Hi,
For enhancing the responsiveness of the MATLAB App GUI that monitors variables on a Beckhoff/TwinCAT PLC, when dealing with an infinite runtime scenario like reading from a Notification Buffer, leveraging the Parallel Computing Toolbox is a good approach.
By using parfeval, the worker runs indefinitely and reads from the buffer and sends the updates back to the main MATLAB session.
For the communication between the background worker and the main session, you can use parallel.pool.DataQueue,with this the worker can enqueue data that the main session consumes asynchronously.
function sync(obj, data, sampleTime)
% Check PLC connection
if obj.plc.connected ~= true
fprintf('PLC not connected, try to reconnect first.\n');
return;
end
% Initialization steps as in your original code...
% (Set up obj.plcCycleTime, obj.sampleTime, obj.syncTypes, etc.)
try
% Create Notification Buffers and Start Notifications as before
% ...
% Create a DataQueue for inter-thread communication
obj.dataQueue = parallel.pool.DataQueue;
% Define the DataQueue's afterEach function to process incoming data
afterEach(obj.dataQueue, @(data) processBufferedData(obj, data));
% Start the background worker for continuous monitoring
obj.bufferWorker = parfeval(@continuousMonitoring, 0, obj, sampleTime);
catch e
error(strcat("Error while setting up continuous monitoring. ", e.message));
end
end
function continuousMonitoring(obj, sampleTime)
% Infinite loop for monitoring
while true
% Simulate reading from the Notification Buffer
% Replace this with actual buffer reading logic
bufferData = readBufferSimulator(obj); % Placeholder function
% Send the data to the main session via DataQueue
send(obj.dataQueue, bufferData);
% Wait for the next sample time
pause(sampleTime);
end
end
function processBufferedData(obj, bufferData)
% Process the data received from the background worker
% This could involve updating the GUI with the new data
updateGUIWithData(obj, bufferData);% Placeholder function
end
You can try the above code to improve the responsiveness by offloading the continuous monitoring of the PLC's Notification Buffer to a background worker.
You can refer the below link for more information on parfeval
