File Exchange Pick of the Week

September 19th, 2008

De do do do, de dah dah dah…

Brett's Pick this week is Morse, by Fahad Al Mahmood.

Last week I blogged about how to make MATLAB talk. This week, we can look at how to make it speak Morse code!

I recall fondly being an undergrad engineering student, and being required to learn Morse code as a prerequisite to throwing my name into contention to drive a solar-powered car in a long-distance race. I never got very good at it (Morse code, that is), and have forgotten everything I once knew. (Except for S's and O's...we all seem to know them!)

Fahad's MORSE is pretty cool; it renders a string of characters as an audible series of dots and dashes, making translating words into Morse code trivially easy. Now if someone would just write a MATLAB program that listens to a series of dots and dashes and translates it back to text. Any takers?

Oh, and there's a t-shirt in it for the first person to post in the comments to this blog the (exact!) message encoded in the video above!


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By Brett Shoelson

Brett is an application engineer who got his start with MATLAB in 1996 while writing a dissertation on the quantification of retinal blood flow. He became a huge fan of MATLAB, and hasn't written a line of C code since.

07:24 UTC | Posted in Picks | Permalink | 9 Comments »

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9 Responses to “De do do do, de dah dah dah…”

  1. Flemming Moller replied on September 19th, 2008 at 07:43 UTC :

    matlab rocks-

  2. Brett replied on September 19th, 2008 at 08:51 UTC :

    Close, Flemming, but no cigar.

  3. Szymon Gackowski replied on September 19th, 2008 at 08:57 UTC :

    – .- – .-.. .- -… .-. — -.-. -.- … .-.-.-
    M A T L A B R O C K S .

  4. Szymon Gackowski replied on September 19th, 2008 at 08:58 UTC :

    ouups there should be space between matlab and rocks (website is cutting more than one space).
    So my answer is:
    MATLAB ROCKS.

  5. Brett replied on September 19th, 2008 at 09:04 UTC :

    We have a winner!

    Note that I would have preferred to write “MATLAB Rocks!” but Fahad didn’t include the exclamation point in his code. Szymon, please send me your address, and I’ll get you your swag.

    (brett.shoelson@mathworks.com)

  6. M replied on September 19th, 2008 at 15:16 UTC :

    There’s a demorse.m file submitted to the exchange. It should appear in a few days. It converts from the audio into readable text, basically ‘de-morsing’. Works with audio files created by the referenced morse function.

  7. Brett replied on October 2nd, 2008 at 09:03 UTC :

    Hi M,
    Back from vacation…just downloaded DEMORSE, and ran it on the WAV file I created for this post. Here’s the output from your program:

    M A T L A B R O C K S .

    Nice work!

    Next challenge: connect to a soundcard (think Data Acquisition Toolbox!), listen for the beeps, and automatically decipher them. Anyone?

  8. mhmt replied on April 24th, 2011 at 12:36 UTC :

    we had a problem while running demorse program “function definitions are not permitted in this context” like this…

  9. Brett replied on April 26th, 2011 at 16:03 UTC :

    @mhmt: I suggest you contact the author of demorse if you’re having issues with that code. (Though given that others are apparently using that file without problems, it sounds like you might have [inadvertently?] changed something in the code.)

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