It's frustrating when a long function or script runs and prints unexpected outputs to the command window. The line producing those outputs can be difficult to find.
Starting in R2024b, use dbstop to find the line with unsuppressed outputs!
Run this line of code before running the script or function. Execution will pause when the line is hit and the file will open to that line. Outputs that are intentionaly displayed by functions such as disp() or fprintf() will be ignored.
We are thrilled to see the incredible short movies created during Week 3. The bar has been set exceptionally high! This week, we invited our Community Advisory Board (CAB) members to select winners. Here are their picks:
Thank you for sharing your tips & tricks with the community. You won a limited-edition MATLAB Shorts.
We still have plenty of MATLAB Shorts available, so be sure to create your posts before the contest ends. Don't miss out on the opportunity to showcase your creativity!
Time to time I need to filll an existing array with NaNs using logical indexing. A trick I discover is using arithmetics rather than filling. It is quite faster in some circumtances
A=rand(10000);
b=A>0.5;
tic; A(b) = NaN; toc
Elapsed time is 0.737291 seconds.
tic; A = A + 0./~b; toc;
Elapsed time is 0.027666 seconds.
If you know trick for other value filling feel free to post.
Thank you for sharing your tips & tricks with the community. You won limited-edition MATLAB Shorts.
We highly encourage everyone to share various types of content, such as tips and tricks for creating animations, background stories of your entry, or learnings you've gained from the contest.
Hello! The MathWorks Book Program is thrilled to welcome you to our discussion channel dedicated to books on MATLAB and Simulink. Here, you can:
Promote Your Books: Are you an author of a book on MATLAB or Simulink? Feel free to share your work with our community. We’re eager to learn about your insights and contributions to the field.
Request Recommendations: Looking for a book on a specific topic? Whether you're diving into advanced simulations or just starting with MATLAB, our community is here to help you find the perfect read.
Ask Questions: Curious about the MathWorks Book Program, or need guidance on finding resources? Post your questions and let our knowledgeable community assist you.
We’re excited to see the discussions and exchanges that will unfold here. Whether you're an expert or beginner, there's a place for you in our community. Let's embark on this journey together!
Congratulations to all winners! Each of you won your choice of a T-shirt, a hat, or a coffee mug. We will contact you after the contest ends.
In week 2, we’d love to see and award more entries in the ‘Seamless Loop’ category. We can't wait to see your creativity shine!
Tips for Week 2:
1.Use AI for assistance
The code from the Mini Hack entries can be challenging, even for experienced MATLAB users. Utilize AI tools for MATLAB to help you understand the code and modify the code. Here is an example of a remix assisted by AI. @Hans Scharler used MATLAB GPT to get an explanation of the code and then prompted it to ‘change the background to a starry night with the moon.’
2. Share your thoughts
Share your tips & tricks, experience of using AI, or learnings with the community. Post your knowledge in the Discussions' general channel (be sure to add the tag 'contest2024') to earn opportunities to win the coveted MATLAB Shorts.
3. Ensure Thumbnails Are Displayed:
You might have noticed that some entries on the leaderboard lack a thumbnail image. To fix this, ensure you include ‘drawframe(1)’ in your code.
Over the past week, we have seen many creative and compelling short movies! Now, let the voting begin! Cast your votes for the short movies you love. Authors, share your creations with friends, classmates, and colleagues. Let's showcase the beauty of mathematics to the world!
We know that one of the key goals for joining the Mini Hack contest is to LEARN! To celebrate knowledge sharing, we have special prizes—limited-edition MATLAB Shorts—up for grabs!
These exclusive prizes can only be earned through the MATLAB Shorts Mini Hack contest. Interested? Share your knowledge in the Discussions' general channel (be sure to add the tag 'contest2024') to earn opportunities to win the coveted MATLAB Shorts. You can share various types of content, such as tips and tricks for creating animations, background stories of your entry, or learnings you've gained from the contest. We will select different types of winners each week.
We also have an exciting feature announcement: you can now experiment with code in MATLAB Online. Simply click the 'Open in MATLAB Online' button above the movie preview section. Even better! ‘Open in MATLAB Online’ is also available in previous Mini Hack contests!
We look forward to seeing more amazing short movies in Week 2!
hello i found the following tools helpful to write matlab programs. copilot.microsoft.com chatgpt.com/gpts gemini.google.com and ai.meta.com. thanks a lot and best wishes.
We're excited to announce that the 2024 Community Contest—MATLAB Shorts Mini Hack starts today! The contest will run for 5 weeks, from Oct. 7th to Nov. 10th.
What creative short movies will you create? Let the party begin, and we look forward to seeing you all in the contest!
If I go to a paint store, I can get foldout color charts/swatches for every brand of paint. I can make a selection and it will tell me the exact proportions of each of base color to add to a can of white paint. There doesn't seem to be any equivalent in MATLAB. The common word "swatch" doesn't even exist in the documentation. (?) One thinks pcolor() would be the way to go about this, but pcolor documentation is the most abstruse in all of the documentation. Thanks 1e+06 !
The 2024 Community Contest—MATLAB Shorts Mini Hack—is just one week away! Last year, we challenged you to create a 48-frame, 2-second animation. This year, we're doubling the fun by increasing the frame count to 96 and adding audio support. Your mission? Create a short movie!
As always, whether you are a seasoned MATLAB user or just a beginner, you can participate in the contest and have opportunities to win amazing prizes.
Timeframe:
The contest will run for 5 weeks, from Oct. 7th to Nov. 10th, Eastern Time.
General Rules:
The first week is dedicated to entry creation, and the fifth week is reserved for voting only.
Create a 96-frame, 4-second animation and add audio. We will loop it 3 times to create a 12-second short movie for you.
The character limit remains at 2,000 characters.
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.
Warm-up!
With one week left before the contest begins, we recommend you warm up by reading a fantastic article: Walkthrough: making Little Nemo's airship in MATLAB by @Tim. The article shares both technical insights and the challenges encountered along the way.
In the spirit of warming up for this year's minihack contest, I'm uploading a walkthrough for how to design an airship using pure Matlab script. This is commented and uncondensed; half of the challenge for the minihacks is how minimize characters. But, maybe it will give people some ideas.
The actual airship design is from one of my favorite original NES games that I played when I was a kid - Little Nemo: The Dream Master. The design comes from the intro of the game when Nemo sees the Slumberland airship leave for Slumberland:
(Snip from a frame of the opening scene in Capcom's game Little Nemo: The Dream Master, showing the Slumberland airship).
I spent hours playing this game with my two sisters, when we were little. It's fun and tough, but the graphics sparked the imagination. On to the code walkthrough, beginning with the color palette: these four colors are the only colors used for the airship:
c1=cat(3,1,.7,.4); % Cream color
c2=cat(3,.7,.1,.3); % Magenta
c3=cat(3,0.7,.5,.1); % Gold
c4=cat(3,.5,.3,0); % bronze
We start with the airship carriage body. We want something rectangular but smoothed on the corners. To do this we are going to start with the separate derivatives of the x and y components, which can be expressed using separate blocks of only three levels: [1, 0, -1]. You could integrate to create a rectangle, but if we smooth the derivatives prior to integrating we will get rounded edges. This is done in the following code:
% Binary components for x & y vectors
z=zeros(1,30);
o=ones(1,100);
% X and y vectors
x=[z,o,z,-o];
y=[1+z,1-o,z-1,1-o];
% Smoother function (fourier / circular)
s=@(x)ifft(fft(x).*conj(fft(hann(45)'/22,260)));
% Integrator function with replication and smoothing to form mesh matrices
u=@(x)repmat(cumsum(s(x)),[30,1]);
% Construct x and y components of carriage with offsets
x3=u(x)-49.35;
y3=u(y)+6.35;
y3 = y3*1.25; % Make it a little fatter
% Add a z-component to make the full set of matrices for creating a 3D
% surface:
z3=linspace(0,1,30)'.*ones(1,260)*30;
z3(14,:)=z3(15,:); % These two lines are for adding platforms
z3(2,:)=z3(3,:); % to the carriage, later.
Plotting x, y, and the top row of the smoothed, integrated, and replicated matrices x3 and y3 gives the following:
We now have the x and y components for a 3D mesh of the carriage, let's make it more interesting by adding a color scheme including doors, and texture for the trim around the doors. Let's also add platforms beneath the doors for passengers to walk on.
Starting with the color values, let's make doors by convolving points in a color-matrix by a door shaped function.
m=0*z3; % Image matrix that will be overlayed on carriage surface
m(7,10:12:end)=1; % Door locations (lower deck)
m(21,10:12:end)=1; % Door locations (upper deck)
drs = ones(9, 5); % Door shape
m=1-conv2(m,ones(9,5),'same'); % Applying
To add the trim, we will convolve matrix "m" (the color matrix) with a square function, and look for values that lie between the extrema. We will use this to create a displacement function that bumps out the -x, and -y values of the carriage surface in intermediary polar coordinate format.
rm=conv2(m,ones(5)/25,'same'); % Smoothing the door function
rm(~m)=0; % Preserving only the region around the doors
rds=0*m; % Radial displacement function
rds(rm<1&rm>0)=1; % Preserving region around doors
rds(m==0)=0;
rds(13:14,:)=6; % Adding walkways
rds(1:2,:)=6;
% Apply radial displacement function
[th,rd]=cart2pol(x3,y3);
[x3T,y3T]=pol2cart(th,(rd+rds)*.89);
If we plot the color function (m) and radial displacement function (rds) we get the following:
In the upper plot you can see the doors, and in the bottom map you can see the walk way and door trim.
Next, we are going to add some flags draped from the bottom and top of the carriage. We are going to recycle the values in "z3" to do this, by multiplying that matrix with the absolute value of a sine-wave, squished a bit with the soft-clip erf() function.
We add a keel to the airship carriage using a canonical sphere turned on its side, again using the soft-clip erf() function to make it roughly rectangular in x and y, and multiplying with a vector that is half nan's to make the top half transparent.
At this point, since we are beginning the plotting of the ship, we also need to create our hgtransform objects. These allow us to move all of the components of the airship in unison, and also link objects with pivot points to the airship, such as the propeller.
% Now we need some flags extending around the top and bottom of the
% carriage. We can do this my multiplying the height function (z3) with the
% absolute value of a sine-wave, rounded with a compression function
% The carriage is done. Now we can make the blimp above it.
We haven't adjusted the shading of the image yet, but you can see the design features that have been created:
Next, we start working on the blimp. This is going to use a few more vertices & faces. We are going to use a tapered cylinder for this part, and will start by making the overlaid image, which will have 2 colors plus radial rings, circles, and squiggles for ornamentation.
M=525; % Blimp (matrix dimensions)
N=700;
% Assign the blimp the cream and magenta colors
t=122; % Transition point
b=ones(M,N,3); % Blimp color map template
bc=b.*c1; % Blimp color map
bc(:,t+1:end-t,:)=b(:,t+1:end-t,:).*c2;
% Add axial rings around blimp
l=[.17,.3,.31,.49];
l=round([l,1-fliplr(l)]*N); % Mirroring
lnw=ones(1,N); % Mask
lnw(l)=0;
lnw=rescale(conv(lnw,hann(7)','same'));
bc=bc.*lnw;
% Now add squiggles. We're going to do this by making an even function in
% the x-dimension (N, 725) added with a sinusoidal oscillation in the
The figures below show the color scheme and mask used to apply the squiggles and circles generated in the code above:
Finally, for the colormap we are going to smooth the binary mask to avoid hard transitions, and use it to to add a "puffy" texture to the blimp shape. This will be done by diffusing the mask iteratively in a loop with a non-linear min() operator.
Notice that the parent of the blimp surface plot is the same as the carriage (e.g. hgtransform object "P"). Plotting at this point using flat shading and adding some lighting gives the image below:
Next, we need to add a propeller so it can move. This will include the creation of a shaft using the cylinder() function. The rest of the pieces (the propeller blades, collars and shaft tip) all use the same canonical sphere with distortions applied using various math functions. Note that when the propeller is made it is linked to hgtransform object "S" rather than "P." This will allow the propeller to rotate, but still be joined to the airship.
% Next, the propeller. First, we start with the shaft. This is a simple
% cylinder. We add an offset variable and a scale variable to move our
% propeller components around, as well.
shx = -70; % This is our x-shifter for components
scl = 3; % Component size scaler
[x,y,z]=cylinder(1, 20); % Canonical cylinder for prop shaft.
Now for some final details including the ropes to the blimp, a flag hung on one of the ropes, and railings around the walkways so that passengers don't plummet to their doom. This will make use of the ad-hoc "ropeG" function, which takes a 3D vector of points and makes a conforming cylinder around it, so that you get lighting functions etc. that don't work on simple lines. This function is added to the script at the end to do this:
% Rope function for making a 3D curve have thickness, like a rope.
% Inputs:
% - xyz (3D curve vector, M points in 3 x M format)
% - N (Number of radial points in cylinder function around the curve
% - W (Width of the rope)
%
% Outputs:
% - xf, yf, zf (Matrices that can be used with surf())
function [xf, yf, zf] = RopeG(xyz, N, W)
% Canonical cylinder with N points in circumference
[xt,yt,zt] = cylinder(1, N);
% Extract just the first ring and make (W) wide
xyzt = [xt(1, :); yt(1, :); zt(1, :)]*W;
% Get local orientation vector between adjacent points in rope
dxyz = xyz(:, 2:end) - xyz(:, 1:end-1);
dxyz(:, end+1) = dxyz(:, end);
vcs = dxyz./vecnorm(dxyz);
% We need to orient circle so that its plane normal is parallel to
Using this function we can define the ropes and balconies. Note that the balconies simply recycle one of the rows of the original carriage surface, defining the outer rim of the walkway, but bumping up in the z-dimension.
And, very last, we are going to add a flag attached to the outer cable. Let's make it flap in the wind. To make it we will recycle the z3 matrix again, but taper it based on its x-value. Then we will sinusoidally oscillate the flag in the y dimension as a function of x, constraining the y-position to be zero where it meets the cable. Lastly, we will displace it quadratically in the x-dimension as a function of z so that it lines up nicely with the rope. The phase of the sine-function is modified in the animation loop to give it a flapping motion.
Putting all the pieces together reveals the full airship:
A note about lighting: lighting and material properties really change the feel of the image you create. The above picture is rendered in a cartoony style by setting the specular exponent to a very low value (1), and adding lots of diffuse and ambient reflectivity as well. A light below the airship was also added, albeit with lower strength. Settings used for this plot were:
What about all the rest of the stuff (clouds, moon, atmospheric haze etc.) These were all (mostly) recycled bits from previous minihack entries. The clouds were made using power-law noise as explained in Adam Danz' blog post. The moon was borrowed from moonrun, but with an increased number of points. Atmospheric haze was recycled from Matlon5. The rest is just camera angles, hgtransform matrix updates, and updating alpha-maps or vertex coordinates.
Finally, the use of hann() adds the signal processing toolbox as a dependency. To avoid this use the following anonymous function:
Create a struct arrays where each struct has field names "a," "b," and "c," which store different types of data. What efficient methods do you have to assign values from individual variables "a," "b," and "c" to each struct element? Here are five methods I've provided, listed in order of decreasing efficiency. What do you think?
Create an array of 10,000 structures, each containing each of the elements corresponding to the a,b,c variables.
Local large language models (LLMs), such as llama, phi3, and mistral, are now available in the Large Language Models (LLMs) with MATLAB repository through Ollama™! This is such exciting news that I can’t think of a better introduction than to share with you this amazing development. Even if you don’t read any further (but I hope you do), because you
In the 2023 MATLAB Mini Hack Contest, Tim Marston captivated everyone with his incredible animations, showcasing both creativity and skill, ultimately earning him the 1st prize.
We had the pleasure of interviewing Tim to delve into his inspiring story. You can read the full interview on MathWorks Blogs: Community Q&A – Tim Marston.
Last question: Are you ready for this year’s Mini Hack contest?
As far as I know, starting from MATLAB R2024b, the documentation is defaulted to be accessed online. However, the problem is that every time I open the official online documentation through my browser, it defaults or forcibly redirects to the documentation hosted site for my current geographic location, often with multiple pop-up reminders, which is very annoying!
Suggestion: Could there be an option to set preferences linked to my personal account so that the documentation defaults to my chosen language preference without having to deal with “forced reminders” or “forced redirection” based on my geographic location? I prefer reading the English documentation, but the website automatically redirects me to the Chinese documentation due to my geolocation, which is quite frustrating!
In the past two years, MATHWORKS has updated the image viewer and audio viewer, giving them a more modern interface with features like play, pause, fast forward, and some interactive tools that are more commonly found in typical third-party players. However, the video player has not seen any updates. For instance, the Video Viewer or vision.VideoPlayer could benefit from a more modern player interface. Perhaps I haven't found a suitable built-in player yet. It would be great if there were support for custom image processing and audio processing algorithms that could be played in a more modern interface in real time.
Additionally, I found it quite challenging to develop a modern video player from scratch in App Designer.(If there's a video component for that that would be great)
BTW,the following picture shows the built-in function uihtml function showing a more modern playback interface with controls for play, pause and so on. But can not add real-time image processing algorithms within it.
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