Book Image

Getting Started with Simulink

By : Luca Zamboni
Book Image

Getting Started with Simulink

By: Luca Zamboni

Overview of this book

Simulink is an engineer's Swiss army knife: instead of spending the day typing out complex formulas, Simulink enables you to both draw and execute them. Block after block, you can develop your ideas without struggling with obscure programming languages and you don't have to wait to debug your algorithm - just launch a simulation! Getting Started with Simulink will give you comprehensive knowledge of Simulink's capabilities. From the humble constant block to the S-function block, you will have a clear understanding of what modelling really means, without feeling that something has been left out. By the time you close the book, you'll be able to further extend your modelling skills without any help. We''ll start with a brief introduction, and immediately start placing the first blocks. Little by little, you'll build a car cruise controller model, followed by the mathematical model of a sports car in order to calibrate it. Then you'll learn how to interface your Simulink model with the external world. This book will give you an easy understanding of the tools Simulink offers you, guiding you through a complex exercise split into the three main phases of Simulink development: modelling, testing, and interfacing.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Simulink drawbacks


Simulink isn't the way to go for small projects with a low budget: a MATLAB license is rather expensive: like the additional packages that may be required for testing on dedicated hardware. It is suited for big projects with a large number of developers working on them. A skilled C developer can write code for simple to trivial projects in a much shorter time than by dragging blocks in Simulink.

MATLAB and Simulink are targeted specifically to engineering and scientific applications; they aren't general-purpose-programming tools. It's difficult, though not impossible, to develop desktop applications or web services using Simulink.

Finally, it's hard to track model changes with software versioning and revision control systems (such as CVS, SVN, Git, Bazaar, or Mercurial). While, to a certain degree, it is possible to spot the differences when saving models with the .mdl format (because it's a structured text file), this has become difficult with the .slx format (a zipped archive with more information on the model). To see and highlight the differences between two versions of the same model, separate software has to be purchased.