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I want to use sensors on an Arduino to control values in a MATLAB program. What are my options for communicating?

I've used Processing to receive data sent via the serial cable, and that strategy has worked pretty well. Is there something similar I can do using MATLAB? I'm somewhat new to MATLAB, so gentle guidance would be great.

I'm not really looking for something like the ArduinoIO package -- I want to have separate computation executing on the Arduino and occasionally informing my MATLAB program (which will occasionally poll the serial line, I suppose).

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6  
Do you need help writing the code for the Arduino, or help writing MATLAB code to read data input from the serial stream? –  anorton Feb 13 at 2:54
1  
This question appears to be off-topic because it is about programming in Matlab. –  The Guy with The Hat Feb 13 at 21:57

3 Answers 3

up vote 2 down vote

MATLAB Support Package for Arduino (aka ArduinoIO Package) allows you to do it fairly easily.

Sample usage:

%-- connect to the board

a = arduino('COM9')

%-- specify pin mode

a.pinMode(4,'input');

a.pinMode(13,'output');

%-- digital i/o

a.digitalRead(4) % read pin 4

a.digitalWrite(13,0) % write 0 to pin 13

%-- analog i/o

a.analogRead(5) % read analog pin 5

a.analogWrite(9, 155) % write 155 to analog pin 9

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If I understand ArduinoIO correctly, all the computation is initiated on the Matlab side and the Arduino just becomes a sensor extension. That isn't what I want. I want to have a program on the Arduino (doing it's own computation) that occasionally communicates with Matlab. –  Bill Nace Feb 15 at 3:26
1  
The MATLAB side simply provides you with the functions to communicate with the Arduino. It's up to you how/when you want the two to communicate. The Arduino can write to the serial port and this allows you to read from it. –  sachleen♦ Feb 15 at 3:28
up vote 2 down vote

I don't know a whole lot about MATLAB, but I found some tutorials about reading and writing from the serial port:

s = serial('COM1');
fopen(s)
fprintf(s, 'Your serial data goes here')
out = fscanf(s)

out is now your received data, and you can do whatever you want with it.

To close:

fclose(s)
delete(s)
clear s

It is from Writing and Reading Data (MATLAB/ Data and File Management/ Serial Port Devices).

From your question I assume you know about the Arduino side of things (using Serial).

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up vote 0 down vote

I've established a connection, sending numbers. By just changing Serial.write to Serial.print and fread to fscanf you can send/receive clear ASCII text instead of binary data.

Both matlab and arduino code can be found at this question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24368670/matlab-plot-serial-data-continously

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