Third-Party Products: Connecting Low-Cost Hardware Platforms to MATLAB and Simulink

Low-cost hardware platforms from Arduino^® to Zynq^® have quickly developed vibrant user communities, and are now used in a range of applications, including sensing and control, computer vision, and robotics. With these platforms and their user communities, makers explore new ideas, students engage in hands-on projects, and developers deliver commercial products. Hardware support packages enable users to stream sensor data into MATLAB^® and automatically generate code to run their Simulink^® models on real hardware.

Arduino, LEGO, and Raspberry Pi Development Platforms

Widely adopted by the maker and student communities, Arduino offers an open hardware architecture with a range of boards and accessories. The LEGO^® MINDSTORMS^® platform offers easy-to-assemble robots, and serves as a powerful teaching tool in many schools. Both platforms are frequently used in robotics and controls applications. Launched in 2012, Raspberry Pi™ is a pocket-sized, single-board computer designed to make computer science accessible for high school students. Kits and projects from the user community have helped broaden the range of applications to computer vision and communications. Support packages enable users to program any of these platforms with Simulink for standalone execution or configure them to communicate with a MATLAB session.

Texas Instruments: C2000 LaunchPad

The Texas Instruments C2000™ MCU family offers hardware for a variety of applications, from low-cost USB form factor controlSTICKs to full-featured developer platforms for solar, motor control, lighting, and digital power applications. Low-cost LaunchPad™ Evaluation Kits and BoosterPack™ plug-in modules make it easy to explore different applications enabled by the C2000 microcontroller. With Embedded Coder^®, engineers can generate optimized C and C++ code directly from their algorithms in Simulink and compile it with TI’s Code Composer Studio™ (CCS) IDE. Target I/O blocks for C2000 peripherals are provided with the C2000 hardware support package.

Xilinx: Zynq and ZedBoard

The Xilinx^® Zynq^®-7000 All-Programmable SoC combines a dual-core ARM^® Cortex^®-A9 with Xilinx 7-series FPGA logic on a single chip. ZedBoard™ provides a low-cost, rapid-prototyping and development platform for a wide variety of Zynq applications, including motor control, software-defined radio, and video and image processing. MathWorks Zynq support enables you to use MATLAB, Simulink, HDL Coder™, and Embedded Coder to target both the ARM cores and the FPGA logic on Zynq.