pid-scope: we open sourced our PID tuning tool

Tuning a PID by watching the robot shows you the symptom. Watching the error curve shows you the cause. So we built pid-scope, and today we are releasing it as open source.

What it does

Your firmware prints comma-separated numbers over serial:

Serial.println(String(error) + "," + String(correction));

pid-scope turns that stream into live charts in your terminal, one per channel, with min/max/mean stats and optional CSV logging. No GUI, no plotter window limits, works over SSH.

Install and run

pip install git+https://github.com/WashingMachineRobocupJR/pid-scope
pid-scope /dev/ttyUSB0 --baud 115200 --labels error,correction

No robot handy? pid-scope --demo runs the UI on simulated data.

The code is on our GitHub, MIT licensed. Issues and pull requests welcome: if it helps your team tune faster, that is exactly why we published it.