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You are invited to join our 2023 community contest – MATLAB Flipbook Mini Hack! This year’s contest revolves around creating interesting animations using MATLAB.
Whether you are a seasoned MATLAB user or just getting started, this contest offers a fantastic opportunity to showcase your skills, learn from others, and engage with the vibrant MATLAB Central community.
Timeframe
This contest runs for 4 weeks from Nov. 6th to Dec. 3rd.
How to play
  • Create a new animation or remix an existing one with up to 2,000 characters of code.
  • Simply vote on the animations you love!
Prizes
You will have opportunities to win compelling prizes, including Amazon gift cards, MathWorks T-shirts, and virtual badges. We will give out both weekly prizes and grand prizes.
Check out the gallery and vote on the animations you like.
The MATLAB Central Community team
I rarely/never save .fig files
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Archive for future reference
23%
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2097 votes
Recently, I came across a post about the JIT compiler on this Korean blog. In the post. The writer discussed the concept of the "Compile Threshold" and how it is calculated.
"The JVM accumulates the number of calls for each method called and compiles when the number exceeds a certain number. In other words, there is a standard for checking how often it is called and then deciding, 'It is time to compile.' This standard is called the compilation threshold. But what is this and why should it be used as a standard?"
The concept of the "Compile Threshold," as used above, seems to be more commonly associated with Tracing just-in-time compilation.
The writer used the simple Java code below to calculate the threshold.
for (int i = 0; i < 500; ++i) {
long startTime = System.nanoTime();
for (int j = 0; j < 1000; ++j) {
new Object();
}
long endTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.printf("%d\t%d\n", i, endTime - startTime);
}
Since the MATLAB execution engine uses JIT compilation, I just wanted to perform the same experiment that the writer did.
I experimented using simple codes based on the code in the blog. I iterated a function 500 time using for-loop and calculated the execution time for each iteration using tic and toc. Then I plotted the execution time for each loop as blow. First five execution times are much higher than followings (10 times!) The test is very rough so I am not sure that I can conclude "MATLAB has Compile Threshold and it is 5!" but this value is actually correct ;-)
t0 = 0;
tfinal = 10;
y0 = [20;20];
timeToRun = zeros(500,1);
for i = 1:500
tStart = tic;
[preypeaks,predatorpeaks] = solvelotka(t0, tfinal, y0);
tEnd = toc(tStart);
timeToRun(i) = tEnd;
end
VS Code Extension for MATLAB was introduced back in April and has been downloaded 75K times since. Do people here use VS Code for writing MATLAB code?
Earlier this year a bunch of MATLAB users got together to talk about their hobbies in a lightning talk format.
  • Using "UIHTML" to create app components and Lightning
  • Creating generative art with MATLAB
  • Making MATLAB run on the Steam Deck (it was a wager)
Do you use MATLAB for hobbies?
Matt J
Matt J
Last activity on 15 Oct 2023

Are there Matlab features which intend to satisfy your needs but fail in certain critical areas, forcing you to abandon them completely in favor of your own version or a 3rd party alternative? Perhaps these features are starting to improve with new Matlab releases, but not quickly enough? Share your own frustrations in the comments below.
Here are two of mine:
1. volumeViewier
volumeViewer is 6 years old now. It is fine when you only need to view one 3D image at a time, but I never do. In my work, I am putting several images side-by-side for visual comparison. For such work, you need to be able to programmatically change axis limits and grayscale and use linkprop to reflect these changes across all the images. With 2D image comparison, all that is possible, but volumeViewer supports none of those things. So, I resort to my own 3D viewer
2.Tomographic projection commands RADON and FANBEAM
These commands are provided in the Image Processing Toolbox seemingly for no other reason than to support homework exercises for people taking introductory tomographic imaging courses. They fail in a number of ways for people who need to do serious tomographic imaging work, producing artifacts or nonlinear effects which shouldn't be there. See for example Why isn't FANBEAM linear? or Radon Transform works unexpectedly. Moreover, the toolbox still provides tomographic projectors only for 2D imaging not 3D, even though 64-bit RAM has made volumetric imaging commonplace in Matlab for at least 10 years. Luckily, there are now freely available 3rd party alternatives like TIGRE.
goc3
goc3
Last activity on 6 Nov 2023

Have you ever learned that something you were doing manually in MATLAB was already possible using a built-in feature? Have you ever written a function only to later realize (or be told) that a built-in function already did what you needed?
Two such moments come to mind for me.
1. Did you realize that you can set conditional breakpoints? Neither did I, until someone showed me that feature. To do that, open or create a file in the editor, right click on a line number for any line that contains code, and select Set Conditional Breakpoint... This will bring up a dialog wherein you can type any logical condition for which execution should be paused. Before I learned about this, I would manually insert if-statements during debugging. Then, after fixing each bug, I would have to delete those statements. This built-in feature is so much better.
2. Have you ever needed to plot horizontal or vertical lines in a plot? For the longest time, I would manually code such lines. Then, I learned about xline() and yline(). Not only is less code required, these lines automatically span the entire axes while zooming, panning, or adjusting axis limits!
Share your own Aha! moments below. This will help everyone learn about MATLAB functionality that may not be obvious or front and center.
(Note: While File Exchange contains many great contributions, the intent of this thread is to focus on built-in MATLAB functionality.)
Moja
Moja
Last activity on 13 Oct 2023

The carot symbol on my keyboard (ˆ shift+6) doesn't work on matlab. Matlab doesn't recognize it so I can't write any equation with power symbol. I tried every possible solution on the web and it doesn't work. even in the character viewer I don't have any result when I search ''caret".
Exciting news for students! 🚀Simulink Student Challenge 2023 is live! Unleash your engineering skills and compete for exciting rewards. Submission deadline is December 12th, 2023!
Adam and Heather will be discussing new features in R2023b and answering your questions in a few hours - visit the link below to check out the preview and sign up for notification.
Adam Danz just launched a new blog about MATLAB Graphics and App Building.
As you know, He has been a prolific contributor to MATLAB Answers and one of his answers recently won the Editor's Choice Award.
If there are any topics or questions you are interested in, please share with Adam, and I am sure he will get those into his blog.
Over the weekend I came across a pi approximation using durations of years and weeks (image below, Wolfram, eq. 89), accurate to 6 digits using the average Gregorian year (365.2425 days).
Here it is in MATLAB. I divided by 1 week at the end rather than multiplying by its reciprocal because you can’t divide a numeric by a duration in MATLAB (1/week).
weeks = @(n)n*days(7);
piApprox = ((years(13)-weeks(6))/years(13) + weeks(3)) / weeks(1)
% piApprox = 3.141593493469302
Here’s a breakdown
  • The first argument becomes 12.885 yrs / 13 yrs or 0.99115
  • Add three weeks: 0.99115 + 3 weeks = 21.991 days
  • The reduced fraction becomes 21.991 days / 7 days
Now it looks a lot closer to the more familiar approximation for pi 22/7 but with greater precision!
Adam Danz
Adam Danz
Last activity on 6 Mar 2024

I'm curious how the community uses the hold command when creating charts and graphics in MATLAB. In short, hold on sets up the axes to add new objects to the axes while hold off sets up the axes to reset when new objects are added.
When you use hold on do you always follow up with hold off? What's your reasoning on this decision?
Can't wait to discuss this here! I'd love to hear from newbies and experts alike!
The way we've solved ODEs in MATLAB has been relatively unchanged at the user-level for decades. Indeed, I consider ode45 to be as iconic as backslash! There have been a few new solvers in recent years -- ode78 and ode89 for example -- and various things have gotten much faster but if you learned how to solve ODEs in MATLAB in 1997 then your knowledge is still applicable today.
In R2023b, there's a completely new framework for solving ODEs and I love it! You might argue that I'm contractually obliged to love it since I'm a MathWorker but I can assure you this is the real thing!
The new interface makes a lot of things a much easier to do. Its also setting us up for a future where we'll be able to do some very cool algorithmic stuff behind the scenes.
Let me know what you think of the new functionality and what you think MathWorks should be doing next in the area of ODEs.
4 months ago, the new API was published to access content on the MATLAB Central community. I shared my MATLAB code to access the API at that time, but the team just released the official SDK.
Houman and Rameez will talk about how you can model wireless networks (5G, WLAN, Bluetooth, 802.11ax WLAN mesh, etc.) in MATLAB in the upcoming livestream. They will start with the basics such as nodes, links, topology and metrics. Then they will introduce a new free add-on library that lets you model such networks, and show you how to use it.
Bookmark this link:
Congratulations, @Adam Danz for winning the Editor's Pick badge awarded for MATLAB Answers, in recognition of your awesome solution in overlapping images in grid layout.
Thank you for going to great lengths to help a user in this thread by suggesting alternative approach to representing stack of playing cards in MATLAB, highlighting very interesting features like hggroup.
This badge recognizes awesome answers people contribute and yours was picked for providing a very detailed and helpful answer.
Thank you so much for setting a high standard for MATLAB Answers and for your ongoing contribution to the community.
MATLAB Central Team
Congratuations, @Voss, for htting this important miletone!
You had a meteoric rise to in our community since you started answering questions in June 2020.
You provided 3218 answers and 926 votes. You are ranked #23 in the community. Thank you for your contribution to the community and please keep up the good track record!
MATLAB Central Team
MATLAB Onramp is a free online tutorial and it has been very popular with new MATLAB users to learn how to use it, and MathWorks have been adding more and more modules. The lastest one just dropped https://matlabacademy.mathworks.com/details/power-systems-simulation-onramp/orps
It shows you the basics of power system simulation by modeling a simple microgrid. You will learn how to simulate and measure three-phase circuits, and how to evaluate algorithms like droop control and maximum power point tracking.
Here's a screenshot from 22 years ago. Thanks for building one of the best engineering and science communities together.
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