Guy and Seth on Simulink

June 6th, 2008

The MATLAB Central community covers a wide range of MathWorks products. After a quick glance, you might not guess there is a Simulink/Real-Time Workshop/Model-Based Design sub-culture, but there is, and I’m going to tell you I stay connected to it using the Simulink newsgroup.

CSSM - The Simulink Newsgroup

You may be asking yourself, “What is Seth talking about? comp.soft-sys.matlab(CSSM) is a MATLAB newsgroup!” The Simulink community is alive and well on CSSM.

The public, un-moderated Usenet newsgroup called comp.soft-sys.matlab started in 1993. It has MATLAB in the name, but it is the right place to talk about all of our products. “All the products?” you say, “Won’t that be noisy?” That is why I read the newsgroup with tags.

Tagging Adds Value

There are hundreds of posts on CSSM every day, and most are on topics unrelated to Simulink. I use the MATLAB Central newsreader to keep up to date on the newsgroup, post replies, and search. The MATLAB Central newsreader offers an enhanced interface to the CSSM by adding search (1) and tagging(2).

I filter the newsgroup with the Simulink tag. While reading posts, I add tags to help further classify articles. I encourage you to add tags too. Tags add value to the community! While reading through the MATLAB Central newsreader you will see this box in the upper right corner to add your own tags.

Clicking on the Simulink tag gives me just the Simulink newsgroup. Across all posts on CSSM there are an interesting distribution of tags. Look at the tag cloud:

Notice that Simulink is a major tag used in the group.

Custom Feeds

You can also create custom feeds to keep track of you favorite tags or searches. After you do a search, or click on one of the tags, the bottom of the page contains a link to the RSS feed for that search result.

I track my favorite feeds through the Google Reader. When I open my Google Reader these are the feeds I see.

As you can see, I am not up to date on all of my feeds. Instead, CSSM comes to me via e-mail.

E-mail Notification

I also use e-mail notification to stay up to date. I get about 10 to 20 emails a day from the newsgroup. I usually just scan through the emails and respond through the reader when I see a question I want to answer, or a discussion on which I want to comment.

Click on the "Add To My Watch List" link as you browse through the newsreader.

You can then specify how often you want to receive e-mail alerts when a message matches your watch list.

Who is in this community?

To start, I am. Here is my newsreader profile. Check out the threads I am watching and my favorite tags. There are many people asking questions, and others providing answers. You also find MathWorks developers like Devdatt or Guoliang who actively answer questions on the newsgroup.

Earlier this week Omur Bas posted an answer to this thread. I learned about using the SimulationCommand:WriteDataLogs to control when data logs show up in the MATLAB workspace.

Now it’s your turn

What discussions do you want to see on CSSM? Have you made your newsreader profile? Who do you recognize from the Simulink community? Leave a comment here and start a thread on the Simulink newsgroup.

20:36 UTC | Posted in Community | Permalink | 3 Comments »

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3 Responses to “The Simulink Central Community”

1. ChinKeat Low replied on August 28th, 2008 at 03:05 UTC :
   

   Hi. I’m a new user of Matlab & Simulink. I would like to know more on building and simulating an electric power system. Is there any link that provides information on SimPowerSystem. Recommendation of a book would be great as i’m still new to this application.

2. Khalid replied on November 10th, 2008 at 10:31 UTC :
   

   Hi, I am trying to run, pause and stop a simulation from a m-file. I can start and top but could not figure out how to pause and resume it.

   I can run the simulation using following code from gui
   options = simset(‘SrcWorkspace’,'current’,…
   ‘Solver’,handles.SolverName,…
   ‘FixedStep’,handles.dt,…
   ‘MaxDataPoints’,handles.DataPoints);
   [tout,xout,yout]=sim(handles.ModelName,[0 handles.Stop_time],options);

   The above code does not allow simulation to be paused.
   If I want to pause the simulation, I need to use set_param command as follows:
   set_param(handles.ModelName,…
   ‘Solver’,handles.SolverName,…
   ‘FixedStep’,num2str(handles.dt),…
   ‘MaxDataPoints’,num2str(handles.DataPoints),…
   ‘StopTime’,num2str(handles.Stop_time));
   set_param(handles.ModelName, ‘SimulationCommand’, ‘start’);
   and then associate following code with PAUSE button
   set_param(handles.ModelName, ‘SimulationCommand’, ‘pause’);
   but the above code does not allow the option of ‘SrcWorkspace’ being set to ‘current’.

   How should I go about it. I do not want the initialisation parameters to be made available to the MATLAB base workspace.

3. wei replied on November 11th, 2008 at 05:12 UTC :
   

   Hi Khalid, try Simulink.ModelWorkspace reload.

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<pre class="code">
a = magic(3);
sum(a)
</pre>

These postings are the author's and don't necessarily represent the opinions of The MathWorks.