Why would I ever use Matlab?

Hi Dig,

MATLAB is the industry standard computing platform. It's used for high powered scientific computing and algorithm testing. You would only use it if you were developing sophisticated models of engineering phenomena or needed to perform any sophisticated mathematical analysis.

Many would claim that it's biggest benefit is that it is a mature program that is heavily supported and allows for quick protoyping of design ideas. For example lets say you're designing a control system, using MATLAB you can quickly create a plant model and start experimenting with a controller such as a PID system. Without ever building the system, you can have MATLAB obtain the ideal control parameters subject to some set of constraints. You could then see bode plots and such all within the same environment.

MATLAB is much more than this, but I think this gives some point of reference. The very major downside of MATLAB is the price tag, it is very expensive software well outside the reach of most individuals(depending on the configuration can cost $10,000+). This has lead many to seek out alternatives and there are a few good open source solutions. Octave is command line based but the syntax is very similar to Matlab and over all it works fairly well. I personally use the Numpy+Scipy+Matplotlib Python libraries to get some of the functionality available built-in to Matlab. The open source alternatives are no where near as developed as MATLAB, but they can be had for the low price of FREE and I can make payments on FREE.

From what I've described I'm sure you have realized that MATLAB is not a seperate language persay but rather a very powerful computing tool with it own proprietary programming language. It's not really meant to create code for microcontrollers, however one of the available modules for it allow you to create C code from the MATLAB code your controller or whatever is based on. You should then be able to clean up the code a little and drop it into a micro. I've never used the feature so I can't say anything about how  well it works.

I hope this helps clear up some confusion.

Best Regards,

Jorge Garcia

Interesting you should ask ?

I've had MATLAB for many years and I'm just wondering if I should renew my subscription (£1113 this year for a small subset of the total toolset) yet again. I do use it quite often for data analysis (it will easily handle large data sets that choke Excel) but rarely for modelling.

I could do the data analysis with other tools but the MATLAB suite is pretty good for system modelling (but getting VERY expensive).

You can also look at Freemat (tiny subset of all that Mathworks offer but free !)

The Mathworks seems to be moving in a slightly different direction from me so that I find very little difference using release 2007 or 2010 (but I paid £3000 to get from one to the other !).

So I hope this rambling helps you a bit (it's helped me focus my ideas !).

Matlab is a set of tools for various tasks that involve math. It can be used in pretty much every engineering field, works under windows, linux and mac. And as previously said it's industry standard, so it's being taught in schools and used in many companies. Matlab itself is programming language (initially was created to replace Fortran in interfacing numerical libraries) and environment (editor, set of reusable functions, GUI tools etc.). I know that Matlab is widely used in applied mathematics, control engineering and signal processing. Mathworks use a slogan "The Language Of Technical Computing". In my faculty (control engineering) knowing matlab (and simulink) is a basic skill. Cost of matlab license is proportional to it's possibilities.

Generally matlab can generate code, but it's more useful for prototyping rather end-user solution. For example when I was testing such feature matlab instead of making simple loop, made 500 if statements I am sure that compiler optimised code but such code is far from being human-friendly. It should be mentioned that mathworks created "matlab coder" feature in latest R2011b release which is supposed to make code production process better (check: http://www.mathworks.com/products/new_products/latest_features.html#). Using matlab for programming MCU's is hard and code is far from being optimised.

Generally knowing matlab is a good asset, but if you are into electronics and you are not involved in serious signal processing it may not be needed (please note I am just a student).

Hi Dig,

there are many good points here as to the advantages of MATLAB.   Several posters have mentioned the big downside is the cost, but open source alternatives are not as mature.  This is definitely changing.   Companies like mine (Equalis - www.equalis.com) are providing open source alternatives (in our case Scilab - www.scilab.org), with value add features like signal processing blocks, communication systems blocks, test and measurement toolboxes and code generation for a very affordable cost.  Basically the best of both worlds, low cost of open source but industrial grade features and support for those that want them.  In today's economic environment we see many engineers open to more cost effective alternatives.