Comments on: R2008b Simulink: Sample Time Colors

By: Jim

Jim — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 14:11:42 +0000

Note that you can still print the sample times using the sim command:

sim(bdroot,[],simset(’Debug’,{’stimes’,’stop’}))

This can be included as text in a report via Report Generator.

By: Arwen Warlock

Arwen Warlock — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:31:02 +0000

@Hans: Thanks for the question. Unfortunately, printing the sample time legend is not available in R2008b. Watch the announcements from the MathWorks for future releases.

By: Han Geerligs

Han Geerligs — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 12:09:01 +0000

@Arwen: thanks for the explanation, it was also my (wild) guess that this would be the reason.
How about printing the legend along with the model?

@Seth: thanks for the explanation as well!

By: Seth

Seth — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:30:12 +0000

For those of you who don’t know Arwen, she is the developer who added the sample time annotations and the sample time legend.

@Arwen - Thanks for providing some background on the feature you have been working so hard on.

@Han Geerligs - The offset can be used to distribute the execution of slow tasks across multiple fast task steps. Consider an embedded system that runs a 10 ms base task, and 4 systems that need to be updated at 40 ms. These 4 can be scheduled with offsets so that only one runs at each 10 ms task, thus not overwhelming the processor, and not requiring premptive multitasking.

[10 0] tid 1 (base task)
[40 0] tid 2 (slow task 1)
[40 10] tid 3 (slow task 2)
[40 20] tid 4 (slow task 3)
[40 30] tid 5 (slow task 4)

By: Arwen Warlock

Arwen Warlock — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:50:39 +0000

Regarding adding the sample time to the annotation, we considered this, and even prototyped it. We found that it made the diagram really busy for two main reasons: 1) the sample times frequently require 5 or more significant digits to represent, and 2) the sample time annotations have to share screen real estate with the data types, dimensions, signal names, and other properties that can be displayed on the lines.

By: Han Geerligs

Han Geerligs — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:52:07 +0000

Hi Seth,

as an enhancement maybe you could add the value of the sampletime to the annotation e.g. D1 [0.01 0] which means: discrete sampletime 1 with Tsample=0.01 and offset=0;

Btw: I was wondering in which situations the offset is chosen unequal to zero: in my daily work I never encounter such a situation?