Technical Articles

Teaching and Learning Resources: Hands-On Learning with MATLAB


MATLAB® supports a variety of hardware platforms for classroom laboratory use. With MATLAB and these platforms, your students can bring theory to life with hands-on projects in controls, mechatronics, robotics, signal processing, and circuit design.

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Analog Discovery

Digilent Analog Discovery Design Kit is a hardware development platform that enables students to design their own analog circuits. Teaching materials, reference designs, and lab projects are available for download.

The Data Acquisition Toolbox™ Support Package for Digilent Analog Discovery hardware lets you perform the following tasks in MATLAB:

  • Read data from the two oscilloscope channels (analog input)
  • Control and generate data from the two waveform generators (analog output)
  • Characterize ICs and measure behavior of the circuit and IC components
  • Find and display Digilent Analog Discovery device settings

Arduino

Arduino® is a microcontroller board for exploring concepts in electrical engineering, motor control, and mechatronics.
MATLAB support for Arduino enables you to use MATLAB to communicate with the Arduino board over a USB cable. With this package your students can:

  • Interactively develop programs to acquire analog and digital data
  • Control DC, servo, and stepper motors
  • Run control loops at up to 25 Hz (not real time)

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi™ is a tiny, low-cost, single-board computer specifically designed for teaching. It features a Broadcom® system-on-a-chip that includes an ARM11 processor running at 700 MHz, 256 or 512 MB RAM, and a VideoCore IV GPU.

MATLAB support for Raspberry Pi includes:

  • A library of MATLAB functions that let you acquire data from sensors and imaging devices, including the Raspberry Pi Camera Board, I2C, SPI and serial interfaces, and GPIO pins
  • Access to prebuilt audio and video algorithms in DSP System Toolbox™ and Computer Vision Toolbox™

Published 2014 - 92211v00

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