Electronic Devices and Circuits
    The MATLAB/Simulink Page

What is MATLAB and where can you find it?

MATLAB and Simulink are products developed and sold by  The MathWorks, Inc. of Natick, Massachusetts.  MATLAB is an  integrated technical computing environment and is the basic processing engine for an extensive set of toolbox products.  Simulink is a graphical interface to MATLAB which provides an interactive environment for modeling, analyzing, and simulating a wide variety of dynamic systems.

MATLAB and Simulink are available on most of the computer in Cruft 217.  A UNIX version of MATLAB 5 and a complete set of toolboxes is available through "ice."  MATLAB 5.2.1 and Simulink are also mount on both Windows and MacOS platforms at the Science Center (see the directory "Math & Statistics" on the shared disk "General Software, FAS_SERVER3" in the FAS computer services.  If you want to work away from Harvard, nonprofessional or student versions are available, but the story is kind of complicated.  There are, in fact, two student versions!
 
 


MATHLAB Student Version
from The MathWorks

The Student Edition of MATLAB
from Prentice-Hall

 

Only MATHLAB Student Version is recommended or useful for ES 154!    It includes Simulink and costs $99 from The MathWorks.  You will also need the signal processing toolkit ($29).   MATHLAB Student Version runs under either Windows or Linux.  If you go this route make sure that you get version 5.2 (or later) of MATLAB and version 2.2 (or later) of Simulink.  These newer versions are considerable more powerful and been used in the development of a lot of the course software.
 
 

ES 154 MATLAB Resources:


Before you start downloading course MATLAB software, first create (if it does not already exist) a folder or directory called es154 in the MATLAB folder.

As you add files it is important that you understand a bit about the MATLAB's search protocol.  To briefly quote from Using MATLAB above.

The MATLAB Search Path
MATLAB has a search path that it uses to find M-files. MATLAB’s M-files are organized in directories or folders on your file system. Many of these directories of M-files are provided along with MATLAB, while others are available separately as Toolboxes.

If you enter the name foo at the MATLAB prompt, the MATLAB interpreter:

1 Looks for foo as a variable.
2 Checks for foo as a built-in function.
3 Looks in the current directory for a file named foo.m.
4 Searches the directories on the search path for foo.m.
While the actual search rules are more complicated because of the restricted scope of private functions, subfunctions, and object-oriented functions, this simplified perspective is accurate for the ordinary M-files that you usually work with.
If you have more than one function with the same name, only the first one in search path order is found; other functions with the same name are considered to be shadowed and cannot be executed.
You can change and browse the search path by using set path in the MATLAB file menu.  You can also directly use the commands path, addpath and rmpath in the command window.
     

MATLAB Documentation Links

If you get stuck here is more than you need in the way of information from Help Desk (HTML) in the MATLAB Help menu.  In the PDF Full Documentation Set the following are particularly useful:
This page was prepared and is maintained by R. Victor Jones
Comments to: jones@deas.harvard.edu.

Last updated September 28, 1999