Matlab add-on that allows Matlab to receive data from the VL53L0X distance sensor through an Arduino board. It is based on Pololu library and was inspired by similiar add-on that uses Adafruit library. Confirmed to work in MATLAB R2019a on Arduino Uno R3.
The add-on was created to suit the needs of AutomationShield project. If you are interested in control engineering and/or you want to learn about educative experiments that can be done using Arduino boards, pay a visit to the project wiki page.
To be able to work with Arduino in Matlab you have to have MATLAB Support Package for Arduino installed.
Assuming you have installed it already, for the add-on to work, the Pololu library has to be included in your Arduino libraries folder. Pololu library file is named vl53l0x-arduino-master and it needs to be included in the folder with default path C:\Users\YourPC\Documents\Arduino\libraries. This can be done manually by simply moving the file there, or by including the .zip library file through Arduino IDE.
To use this add-on you have to copy the +arduinoioaddons file somewhere on your computer and
add it to the Matlab search path.
For example if its current location is C:\Program Files\myProject\myFile\+arduinoioaddons you would use Matlab command addpath('C:\Program Files\myProject\myFile').
Now Matlab should be able to recognize the Arduino library inside of this add-on. To check if was detected sucessfully use Matlab command
listArduinoLibraries.
You should see the {'Pololu/Pololu_VL53L0X'} somewhere in the list of listed libraries.
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Firstly, you have to create arduino object in Matlab. For example if you are using Arduino UNO, it is connected to COM3 and you want to use this library on it, then command to create this object would look like:
arduinoObject = arduino('COM3', 'Uno', 'Libraries', 'Pololu/Pololu_VL53L0X') -
The next thing you need to do, is to create sensor object in Matlab. Sensor object is linked to arduino object and its creation should look like:
sensorObject = addon(arduinoObject, 'Pololu/Pololu_VL53L0X') -
After that comes initialisation of the sensor with:
beginSensor(sensorObject) -
Getting readings from sensor with:
readingInMillimetres = readSensor(sensorObject) -
And in case you do not need it anymore, removing the sensor object with:
removeSensor(sensorObject)
The add-on uses continuous reading mode with 20 millisecond measure timing budget. That means you should not use sampling step size smaller than 0.02 seconds to prevent overrun. To modify the timing budget and/or add more functions to the add-on see the functions of the library it uses - Pololu library functions.