Simulink – Internet of Things

Build IoT Projects on Arduino Day Using MATLAB and ThingSpeak

Hans Scharler — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 22:01:05 +0000

April 1st is Arduino Day, no joke! For in person events near you, check out the Arduino Day website. If you have been kicking around an idea about a project to build, this is a great time to try to get it done and share it with others from around the world. We provide some great tools to build projects that use Arduino.

MathWorks Arduino Resources

Maybe it’s time to build your version of a MATLAB and Arduino powered dartboard.

We hope you build some awesome projects using Arduino, MATLAB, Simulink, and ThingSpeak on Arduino Day!

Building a Dynamic and Self-organizing Network of Devices

Hans Scharler — Sat, 25 Mar 2017 19:24:56 +0000

Anders Sollander, a principal technical consultant at MathWorks, and his team put together a project to determine what demo was the most popular at one of our demo showcases. Anders made an assumption that if your demo was popular, you would have a lot of visitors. If you have a lot of visitors, your demo would be the loudest.

Anders was determined to measure sound from over 20 demo stations at the same time and figure out who the the winner is. This turns out to be a complicated challenge and he used our tools such as MATLAB, Simulink, and ThingSpeak, to produce some interesting results. Here’s what the raw data looks like from just five sound sensor nodes at the demo stations.

The sensor nodes uses the Arduino Nano devices because they’re small, low-cost, and Simulink has an Arduino support package. Arduino Nano’s both low cost and energy efficient which is great, but it doesn’t have Wi-Fi. They connect the sensor nodes to an Internet-connected Raspberry Pi using an RF mesh network with the nRF24l01+ radio. The RF24 solution is both very cheap and energy efficient, which is valuable if you’re running them with battery power. Simulink Coder has a Raspberry Pi Support Package which simplified the workflow.

When you follow the tutorial, you are going to learn many things and experience their analytic workflow as they decide how to develop an algorithm to normalize sound levels, determine which data to send to ThingSpeak, and build visualizations to see the results of the project.

Anders also shared a library on File Exchange that allows users to communicate with RF24 chips on Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards. The library relies on the RF24Mesh library, and has S-functions that interact with the classes there. The File Exchange submission includes an example for the Arduino to read sensor data from a temperature sensor and sends it to the gateway Raspberry Pi and then sends the data to ThingSpeak. In order to download the File Exchange, you need to sign in with your MathWorks account. This would be the same account that you use on ThingSpeak.com.

Visit ThingSpeak Tutorials, to see the complete tutorial for Building a Dynamic and Self-organizing Network of Devices.

element14 Webinar: How To Use MATLAB and Simulink With ThingSpeak

Hans Scharler — Thu, 12 Nov 2015 02:46:00 +0000

element14 is hosting a free webinar, “How To Use MATLAB and Simulink With ThingSpeak“, a free webinar hosted by Eric Wetjen of MathWorks. Join the webinar live on November 12, 2015 at 10am EST or watch a recording at a later time.

This webinar will show how you can use MATLAB and Simulink with ThingSpeak, an Internet of Things data collection platform. ThingSpeak can be used to collect, analyze and act on data sent from devices such as Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. To illustrate this, a car counter is implemented overlooking a busy highway using a Raspberry Pi 2 and a webcam. In this demonstration, Simulink is used to deploy the car-counting algorithm on the Raspberry Pi which is connected to ThingSpeak. The traffic can be analyzed offline with MATLAB or online using ThingSpeak and its built-in MATLAB Analysis and MATLAB Visualizations apps.

Eric Wetjen has been working in Product Marketing at MathWorks for the last 7 years. He focuses on bringing MATLAB analysis capabilities to low cost hardware, Test and Measurement equipment and Internet of Things devices. Prior to MathWorks, Eric held various positions in Product Management and Application Engineering primarily in the telecom industry. Eric holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from Brown University.

Sign up at element14.

Counting Cars and Analyzing Traffic

Hans Scharler — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 21:05:59 +0000

The power of any tool becomes magnified when you start combing it with other tools. In this File Exchange project by Eric Wetjen, he demonstrates a powerful project by using a webcam to gather live traffic video of Route 9 in Natick, MA, using Simulink to deploy a car-counting algorithm to a Raspberry Pi, using MATLAB to perform analysis, and using ThingSpeak to collect and share the analyzed data with others.

The project uses a Raspberry Pi 2 and USB webcam acting as a sensor. The webcam picks up traffic flowing in both directions. Once the algorithm for detecting cars is modeled in Simulink, the algorithm gets deployed on the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi sends the raw data to ThingSpeak on regular basis where it is analyzed using the MATLAB Analysis app on ThingSpeak.

After sending to ThingSpeak, Eric created a MATLAB Analysis app to calculate the daily traffic-volume on ThingSpeak Channel 51671. Now that the data is public, others could use this processed data within apps such as Waze to optimize directions using analyzed traffic flows.

Check out the article for the complete project details and all of the code to get your Raspberry Pi + ThingSpeak analysis project started.