SIMULINK and GUIs - A Guide to MATLAB for Beginners and Experienced Users - page 121

Chapter 8
SIMULINKandGUIs
In this chapter we describe SIMULINK, a MATLAB accessory for simulat-
ing dynamical processes, and GUIDE, a built-in tool for creating your own
graphical user interfaces. These brief introductions are not comprehensive,
but together with the online documentation they should be enough to get you
started.
SIMULINK
IfyouwanttolearnaboutSIMULINKindepth,youcanreadthemassivePDF
document SIMULINK: Dynamic System Simulation for MATLAB that comes
with the software. Here we give a brief introduction for the casual user who
wants to get going withSIMULINK quickly. You start SIMULINK by double-
clicking on SIMULINK in the Launch Pad, by clicking on the SIMULINK
button on the MATLAB Desktop tool bar, or simply by typing simulink in
the Command Window. This opens the SIMULINK library window, which is
shown for UNIX systems in Figure 8-1. On Windows systems, you see instead
the SIMULINK Library Browser, shown in Figure 8-2.
To begin to use SIMULINK, click New : Model from the File menu. This
opens a blank model window. You create a SIMULINK model by copying units,
called blocks , from the various SIMULINK libraries into the model window.
We will explain how to use this procedure to model the homogeneous linear
ordinary differential equation u + 2 u + 5 u = 0, which represents a damped
harmonic oscillator.
First we have to figure out how to represent the equation in a way that
SIMULINK can understand. One way to do this is as follows. Since the time
variable is continuous , we start by opening the “Continuous” library, in UNIX
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