LED blinking - Programming Arduino using Matlab 1

1. Create a directory and create a new a new script file in that directory.

Using mkdir function create a new working directory. Here we have used the name of directory as "programming-arduino-using-matlab". And go into that folder using the cd command.

2. Create a new script file

Now inside the folder created above, create a new script file called "led_blink". 

And write the following following program.

%create arduino object a using arduino() function
a = arduino();

%create a name variable led for digital pin D9
led = 'D9';

%turn on/off led using for loop
for k=1:10
    disp('LED ON');
    writeDigitalPin(a,led,1);
    pause(1);
    disp('LED OFF');
    writeDigitalPin(a,led,0);
    pause(1);
end

%display messsage to close the arduino board
disp('Arduino Close');

%clear object variable a from matlab memory
clear a;

In your matlab editor you should have something like this.

What we wrote and why in the program is the following. First in order to connect matlab to Arduino, we create an object variable called "a" using arduino() function. The arduino() function can accept parameters like the com port and which arduino board is being used. But in our case we didn't pass any arguments to the arduino() function because only Arduino UNO is connected to computer and Matlab will automatically know and configure the Arduino board connected to it. But suppose you had multiple Arduino boards connected to the computer then you should specify the other parameters as we will show you how in later tutorials.

The next line led = 'D9' is just giving alias name led to the digital pin 9. Then we used a for loop to create turn on and off the led connected to digital pin 9. Inside the loop, we have used disp() function to display message "LED ON" and "LED OFF" to user in matlab. This is not actually required and is used for visual indication only. The function that turns on and off the LED from the matlab program is the writeDigitalPin() function. The first argument is the Arduino object 'a' that we created earlier, The second argument is the pin we are using which is led variable declared earlier. The third argument is the high or low which is 1 or 0. The pause() function stops execution of program for the real number in second specified. That is it creates a delay in seconds.