Thanks to the folks at Sasquatch Collective, there is now a new open source and free real time current monitor for the CurrentRanger, the Current-Ranger-GUI. All such initiatives are highly welcomed appreciated. Here’s a look at the sleek UI:
It connects over USB serial, parses the CurrentRanger’s scientific notation output, and plots current draw in real time with a dark-themed Tk/Matplotlib interface.
It comes with some very notable features:
- Auto-detects CurrentRanger serial port
- Real-time scrolling plot at ~1300 Hz sample rate
- Live stats: current, average, peak, minimum, sample count, sample rate
- Click-and-drag selection for stats on a region of the trace
- Scroll to zoom, pause to inspect
- Adjustable time window (5s, 10s, 30s, 60s, 5m, all)
- Export to CSV (full buffer, or just the selected region)
- Min/max envelope downsampling for smooth rendering of large datasets
Since this is open source I am sure it is highly customizable for those that have special use cases or want to augment the GUI’s or CurrentRanger’s capabilities. For installation details head over to their Github repository, I also forked it for posterity.
A real-time graphical view is exactly what the CurrentRanger always deserved — the hardware nails low-current measurement, but squinting at a serial stream of numbers never told the story the way a live plot does. Watching a microcontroller’s sleep current drop as you prune one delay loop is the kind of feedback that makes power profiling almost fun, and open source plus free removes the last excuse not to try it. Credit to the Sasquatch Collective folks for contributing this rather than keeping it internal; that is how small hardware ecosystems stay alive. Does the GUI log traces to file for post-hoc zooming, or is the display purely live? Either answer works for my bench, but export would settle a few multiday battery arguments for good.