Need help regarding visual actuators (lights) in Simulink

Hi everyone, I am almost new in Simulink and need urgent help regarding showing the final result of my model. The way I have implemented my lights as an actuator (as I asked in my previous questions ) are really slow and not functional at all. I am searching for the best possible ways to show the results of simulation with turning some lights on or showing some picture as alarm to user. I am sure it is possible in Simulink but could not find it. I also dont know which kind of visual actuators are available for a Simulink model.

Any idea would be greatly appreciated.

[Moe_2015]

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/29922-why-your-question-is-not-urgent-or-an-emergency

Answer 1

[Swarooph]

As of R2015a, you can use the 'Lamp' block in the dashboard library. Documentation here.

More on the Dashboard blocks here.

[Saeed Soltani]

How about R2013b?

[Swarooph]

If I remember correctly from one of your earlier questions. You were reading in images to set block mask? Instead, maybe you should try setting only the background/foreground colors of the respective blocks. This could be faster, I am not sure. Some info here. How to do it using commands is here.

In general I am not so sure if its a good idea to have the model blocks to change while the simulation is running. Lamp block above was designed to be updated every time step so would probably be the fastest. Otherwise, consider simplifying the approach by using a display block to display a 1 or 0. I would assume this would be faster as well.

[Saeed Soltani]

Thank you for your reply. But even if I want to change the color of blocks, have to use set_param again and this is the main problem in which I have to use coder.extrinsic and consequently again speed problem. I still think that there must be a solution for it, but how? I don’t know.

[Swarooph]

Have you tried the color approach to determine if the speed problem actually exists similar to the image approach? I think this would be a good exercise so that we can understand if the performance issue here is because of reading an image or using set_param.

[Saeed Soltani]

Yes, it is a bit faster. But because I have to use around 8 of different sensor blocks, it is still so slow. I think this is because of coder.extrinsic.