MATLAB & Simulink Student Suite – Raspberry Pi Bundle
Today, a look at a speedy way for students to prototype, test, analyse and deploy sophisticated applications on Raspberry Pi, using industry tools: MathWorks’ MATLAB, a high-level programming environment for visualising and analysing data, computation, mathematical modelling, and algorithm development; and Simulink, which provides a block diagramming environment for modelling and simulating dynamic systems.
element14 recently launched a Learn to Program Pack consisting of MATLAB and Simulink Student Suite bundled with their Raspberry Pi 2 starter kit, which gives you a Pi 2, microSD card, power supply and case. The bundle provides students with everything they need to kick off their projects quickly using the same tools that professional engineers and scientists use day-to-day: you can use Simulink on your Raspberry Pi to describe, simulate and test your system, analyse it with MATLAB, then generate code from Simulink to deploy to a Raspberry Pi or another platform.
Here, Eben uses Simulink to program and test a robot with simple image processing and autonomous navigation:
There are endlessly rich possibilities here: how about getting your Pi robot to detect faces and behave accordingly? You’ll find lots more resources to help with using these powerful tools on the MATLAB & Simulink element14 community.
9 comments
Janw
Can someone tell me why the Element14 offer for this Learn to Program Pack (€148.35) is interesting? I can buy Matlab Student at €69 on the Mathworks site (https://uk.mathworks.com/store/link/products/student/SV) and Element14 list their Raspberry Pi 2 starter kit at €44.73. What am I missing?
Paul Cox
The prices are different because you are comparing two different things. That is on the one hand just MATLAB, and on the other, the MATLAB and Simulink Student Suite, which is MATLAB, Simulink, plus about 10 toolboxes for signal processing and other domains.
JanW
Sorry, saw your reply just now – and I think you are mistaken. The link I pointed to does indeed reference the Matlab Student Suite (including Simulink and the toolboxes you mention). At a price of 69€. At least when I visit the link from France.
skspurling
I used MatLab and Simulink in engineering courses and really liked it. I love the Raspberry Pi. This combination and pricing really bother me. The idea here should be to make it so kids and interested hobbyists can get their feet wet and learn something. At this pricing, I am outside my budget for something to play/learn with and had better be producing something to earn an income. It’s anathema to what I was always lead to believe the raspberry pi stood for. Making STEM education accessible.
josar
I used Simulink back at the university. Nice piece of software. But I like REX Control System for programming my Raspberry Pi better (http://www.rexcontrols.com/rex-control-system-raspberry-pi). As soon as you get used to dragging lines with the right mouse button, it is very similar to Simulink. They even have a free demo. No image processing though.
Andrea
An alternative free (and very good for educational purposes):
http://www.scilab.org
It can be installed on Rasp, and it’s present on the debian manager, so very easy install (a simple “apt-get install scilab”).
I used to Simulink at the University, a very poweful suite, but now I use Xcos (included in Scilab) to make my models and experiments.
Twinkle
Thanks Andrea for this piece of information.
Will Price
I never understood the appeal of MATLAB, although I can’t comment on Simulink or any of the other graphical programs provided.
I’m very much a fan of the scientific python projects
– sympy: a computer algebra system, capable of solving integrals, manipulating complex boolean expressions etc (http://www.sympy.org/en/index.html)
– scikit-learn: machine learning algorithms toolbox (http://scikit-learn.org/stable/)
There’s also an amalgamation of packages a la MATLAB in the form of scipy (http://www.scipy.org/)
Lee
Looks an interesting piece of software, quick question though, do I need to be a student to register the software?
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