Simulink, a graphical tool for modeling and simulating systems, provides an interactive graphical programming environment and enables rapid prototyping to explore design ideas at an early stage. An attracting feature of Simulink is that you can tune parameters of your design "on the fly" and immediately see what happens on the BeagleBoard, for "what if" exploration.
There are two major kinds of elements in Simulink, namely function blocks and signal lines. As a graphical programming language, a program is presented as a block diagram (referred to as a Simulink model) where blocks are connected by lines. In this section, we will build a simple program by creating a Simulink model and then run that model to play a music file (a *.wav
file) on the BeagleBoard. We will also adjust the parameters of the model (in this example model, it is the volume or balance) on the fly.