All things MATLAB. And Simulink.
Apart from being a senior application engineer supporting Mathworks customers, I have being maintaining my past time hobby in mobile phone app development. Now, what has MATLAB got to do with mobile phone app development?
Before I joined TechSource Systems more than 1.5 year ago, MATLAB to me is just a very good mathematics modeling software, or an ‘expensive calculator’ as some people call it. I have used it during my university days to do some mathematic calculation, and during my postgraduate I have used it do symbolic maths based modeling. After joining TechSource, it dawns upon me that MATLAB is much more than an expensive calculator. With about 70 toolboxes and counting, MATLAB enables design and simulation in most scientific fields that one can think of. Read more of this post
Somewhere along the way during my time in college, MATLAB has been part of some of the classes. Although nothing spectacular has been accomplished on my part, I could recall class instructors being able to do some really cool things out of nowhere, with MATLAB and Simulink. My perception was: These professors must be REALLY good and experienced in programming in order to do all that. Coming from an aerospace background and having limited knowledge in programming, I used to think that MATLAB is really nothing different from languages such as C/C++, Java, FORTRAN, etc. It turned out I was wrong.
Posting articles about MATLAB & Simulink at a pace faster than we can write seems like a good idea… until we begin to run out of articles. I guess that’s enough warm up for now.
Will begin posting articles at a slower pace, perhaps once every two-three weeks.
Some of you may have noticed the occasional layout changes on this blog. I am trying to find the right layout so that our articles (with its code and images) can display properly.
And not to forget: Dear subscribers, thank you for staying with us. I’m glad you find interesting reads, and I hope you continue to do so!
MATLAB is renowned for algorithm exploration and development. On the other hand, Simulink is capable of performing time-based multi-domain system-level design, modelling, analysis, simulation in the graphical environment. Besides, Simulink also streamlines the development of embedded systems like FPGA and provides hardware verification or co-simulation of the user design, modelling and algorithm. With hardware co-simulation and deployment, we can obtain early customer feedback and confirmation.
Therefore, Mathworks has introduced EDA Simulator Link 3.3 with the ability of FPGA co-simulation via any of several Xilinx development boards in the Simulink environment. With EDA Simulator Link 3.3, we can:
Introduction
Imagine this scenario: You have a number of MATLAB machines designated to a number of tasks: test benches, production management, image processing, etc. Every machine does their job really well (after all, it’s MATLAB), and everything was good. But being the radical engineer that you are, you begin to wonder:
“What if we can set up every machine to talk to one another, and work in sync – like a perfectly orchestrated symphony?”
The hardware setup wouldn’t be much of a problem: All that you need to do is to wire up (or wirelessly link up) all the computers to a local network and you’re good to go. We can use TCP/IP for our communication. But does MATLAB support TCP communication?
Read more of this post
Introduction – Teaching in University
In the engineering sphere, courses are usually commenced off with introduction of formulae or equations that describe underlying principles of various theories. These equations are then transformed from printed symbols on the blackboard to actual observed occurrences in real world systems (through experiments conducted in laboratory classes). This is the teaching method that has been practised for centuries and is widely believed to be the best method by lecturers.
However, this current teaching approach can still be improved. In reality, most students find it difficult to relate the theories they learnt to the real world systems they actually see.
Figure 1 – Missing Link between Theories learnt in lectures and the Real World Applications.
This is because there are many limitations to what can be achieved in the laboratory (e.g. safety, cost). Besides, experiments are not always easy to grasp the first time doing it nor it is as straightforward as it may thought to be. An intermediate stage between these two phases is needed to ease and speed up the transition. This intermediate stage will be discussed in the next section but before that let’s see how teaching has evolved over the century and why this intermediate phase is important in this modern world. Read more of this post
Now, xPC target not only in control applications but also in image and video processing applications!
As of R2011a release, MathWorks has introduced new capabilities of xPC target. The new capability now supports xPC target in real time image and video processing and FPGA implementations. In this new release some of the new features of xPC target are:
Introduction
Some of us Simulink users may find ourselves needing a graphical user interface (GUI) to run and interact with our dynamic simulation. For instance, we may need to modify block parameters or visualise results during the simulation, and not afterwards. Fortunately, you can.
Although Simulink does provide a programmable interface that you can call from MATLAB, this capability is rarely put into use (in fact, it is hardly even known by most users.) This article describes some of the ways in which you can utilise Simulink’s interface in MATLAB GUI.
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MATLAB Coder is fundamentally changing the way engineers and scientists work on account of the fact that it eliminates the needs to manually translate MATLAB algorithms into C and C++ codes for standalone prototyping, hardware implementation, software integration as well as user-written program acceleration. This automatic portable C/C++ code generation functionality has subsequently increased the productivity, improved the quality and enabled innovation to be fostered in the arena of science and engineering.
MATLAB supports a huge arsenal of hardware accessing methods through its various toolboxes. However, there are still some hardware which are not directly supported by MATLAB. This happens when you are trying to access a custom hardware or a commercial hardware which is not commonly used along with MATLAB.
To overcome this, one of the easiest ways is to access the hardware via .NET [1]. Commercial hardware vendors will normally provide driver for user to communicate with their hardware and the .NET driver is one of the most common types of drivers provided.
Read more of this post
