Doug's pick this week is SIMLOG by Robin Larsson

Hi, my name is Doug, and I'm one the guest pickers that will be contributing to the Pick of the Week blog occasionally. I started using MATLAB and Simulink while studying mechanical engineering in college. I soon found I was more interested in doing cool stuff with the software than the actual engineering, so I'm thrilled to now be working at MathWorks as an Application Engineer like Brett and Jiro. I tend to focus on the Simulink and control related tools so you may find that my picks are generally related to those topics.

When I first started using Simulink I would add lots of scope blocks to my models when something wasn't behaving the way I expected and I needed to locate the source of the problem. While this worked, it was a bit tedious and cluttered up my models significantly. Once I had resolved the issue I would delete all these debugging scopes to restore the clean look. And of course if another issue cropped up, I'd go through the whole process again.

In R14, Simulink gained the ability to log and plot signals without using any additional blocks. In R14SP3, MATLAB introduced the timeseries object and the Time Series Tool that help manage and analyze time series data such as what is produced by Simulink. However when I go out and talk to users today I find that many are not aware that these capabilities exist. What I like about Robin's SIMLOG tool is that it exposes these new capabilities to users and highlights their advantages. It also makes it easier to enable and disable the logging of many signals simultaneously.

With SIMLOG you can select whatever signals you are interested in and then log them all with one click. After running the simulation you can then plot whatever signal you select in a standard MATLAB figure:

Robin has also added the ability to select all the signals in a subsystem or exclude or include signals based on block type. In addition there is a button to launch the time series tool to further analyze the logged data.

This is a great first submission from Robin.

Comments

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