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Since May 2023, MathWorks officially introduced the new Community API(MATLAB Central Interface for MATLAB), which supports both MATLAB and Node.js languages, allowing users to programmatically access data from MATLAB Answers, File Exchange, Blogs, Cody, Highlights, and Contests.
I’m curious about what interesting things people generally do with this API. Could you share some of your successful or interesting experiences? For example, retrieving popular Q&A topics within a certain time frame through the API and displaying them in a chart.
If you have any specific examples or ideas in mind, feel free to share!
For Valentine's day this year I tried to do something a little more than just the usual 'Here's some MATLAB code that draws a picture of a heart' and focus on how to share MATLAB code. TL;DR, here's my advice
  1. Put the code on GitHub. (Allows people to access and collaborate on your code)
  2. Set up 'Open in MATLAB Online' in your GitHub repo (Allows people to easily run it)
I used code by @Zhaoxu Liu / slandarer and others to demonstrate. I think that those two steps are the most impactful in that they get you from zero to one but If I were to offer some more advice for research code it would be
3. Connect the GitHub repo to File Exchange (Allows MATLAB users to easily find it in-product).
4. Get a Digitial Object Identifier (DOI) using something like Zenodo. (Allows people to more easily cite your code)
There is still a lot more you can do of course but if everyone did this for any MATLAB code relating to a research paper, we'd be in a better place I think.
What do you think?
On my computers, this bit of code produces an error whose cause I have pinpointed,
load tstcase
ycp=lsqlin(I, y, Aineq, bineq);
Error using parseOptions
Too many output arguments.
Error in lsqlin (line 170)
[options, optimgetFlag] = parseOptions(options, 'lsqlin', defaultopt);
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The reason for the error is seemingly because, in recent Matlab, lsqlin now depends on a utility function parseOptions, which is shadowed by one of my personal functions sharing the same name:
C:\Users\MWJ12\Documents\mwjtree\misc\parseOptions.m
C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2024b\toolbox\shared\optimlib\parseOptions.m % Shadowed
The MathWorks-supplied version of parseOptions is undocumented, and so is seemingly not meant for use outside of MathWorks. Shouldn't it be standard MathWorks practice to put these utilities in a private\ folder where they cannot conflict with user-supplied functions of the same name?
It is going to be an enormous headache for me to now go and rename all calls to my version of parseOptions. It is a function I have been using for a long time and permeates my code.
General observations on practical implementation issues regarding add-on versioning
I am making updates to one of my File Exchange add-ons, and the updates will require an updated version of another add-on. The state of versioning for add-ons seems to be a bit of a mess.
First, there are several sources of truth for an add-on’s version:
  • The GitHub release version, which gets mirrored to the File Exchange version
  • The ToolboxVersion property of toolboxOptions (for an add-on packaged as a toolbox)
  • The version in the Contents.m file (if there is one)
Then, there is the question of how to check the version of an installed add-on. You can call matlab.addon.installedAddons, which returns a table. Then you need to inspect the table to see if a particular add-on is present, if it is enabled, and get the version number.
If you can get the version number this way, then you need some code to compare two semantic version numbers (of the form “3.1.4”). I’m not aware of a documented MATLAB function for this. The verLessThan function takes a toolbox name and a version; it doesn’t help you with comparing two versions.
If add-on files were downloaded directly and added to the MATLAB search path manually, instead of using the .mtlbx installer file, the add-on won’t be listed in the table returned by matlab.addon.installedAddon. You’d have to call ver to get the version number from the Contents.m file (if there is one).
Frankly, I don’t want to write any of this code. It would take too long, be challenging to test, and likely be fragile.
Instead, I think I will write some sort of “capabilities” utility function for the add-on. This function will be used to query the presence of needed capabilities. There will still be a slight coding hassle—the client add-on will need to call the capabilities utility function in a try-catch, because earlier versions of the add-on will not have that utility function.
I also posted this over at Harmonic Notes
I got thoroughly nerd-sniped by this xkcd, leading me to wonder if you can use MATLAB to figure out the dice roll for any given (rational) probability. Well, obviously you can. The question is how. Answer: lots of permutation calculations and convolutions.
In the original xkcd, the situation described by the player has a probability of 2/9. Looking up the plot, row 2 column 9, shows that you need 16 or greater on (from the legend) 1d4+3d6, just as claimed.
If you missed the bit about convolutions, this is a super-neat trick
[v,c] = dicedist([4 6 6 6]);
bar(v,c)
% Probability distribution of dice given by d
function [vals,counts] = dicedist(d)
% d is a vector of number of sides
n = numel(d); % number of dice
% Use convolution to count the number of ways to get each roll value
counts = 1;
for k = 1:n
counts = conv(counts,ones(1,d(k)));
end
% Possible values range from n to sum(d)
maxtot = sum(d);
vals = n:maxtot;
end

I noticed recently that my data is no longer updating on thingspeak again. Is there a connectivity issues with thingspeak

my code is as below:
#include "DHT.h"
#define DHTPIN 15 // what pin we're connected to
#define DHTTYPE DHT11
DHT dht(DHTPIN, DHTTYPE);
#define THINGSPEAK_API_KEY "1P4RY69D3YMP9R5W"
#include <SoftwareSerial.h>
#include <OneWire.h>
#include <DallasTemperature.h>
//-----------------------------
#include <ArduinoJson.h>
StaticJsonDocument<200>JsonDocument;
SoftwareSerialmyserial(10, 11);
//-------------------------
float voltage;
unsignedintfrac;
//---------------------
#define ONE_WIRE_BUS 5
OneWireoneWire(ONE_WIRE_BUS);
DallasTemperaturesensors(&oneWire);
floatCelcius = 0;
float Fahrenheit = 0;
//==========================================================================================================
bytesensorInterrupt = 0; // 0 = digital pin 2
bytesensorPin = 2;
// The hall-effect flow sensor outputs approximately 4.5 pulses per second per
// litre/minute of flow.
floatcalibrationFactor = 5.5; //==========================================================we change cal factor 4.5 to 5.5 if not work chnage again(4.5)
//========== 5.5 calibration factor is working efficent then 4.5 , 7.5 ,and 6.5
volatile byte pulseCount;
floatflowRate;
unsignedintflowMilliLitres;
unsigned long totalMilliLitres, tempTotal = -1;
unsigned long oldTime;
//-------------------------------------------------------
intpH_Value;
float Voltage;
//----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
void setup() {
// put your setup code here, to run once:
Serial.begin(9600);
myserial.begin(9600);
//--------------------------------
pinMode(sensorPin, INPUT);
digitalWrite(sensorPin, HIGH);
pulseCount = 0;
flowRate = 0.0;
flowMilliLitres = 0;
totalMilliLitres = 0; // ============================================================
oldTime = 0;
attachInterrupt(sensorInterrupt, pulseCounter, FALLING);
sensors.begin();
//------------------------------------------------
/********************GSM Communication Starts********************/
if (myserial.available())
Serial.write(myserial.read());
myserial.println("AT");
delay(1000);
myserial.println("AT+SAPBR=3,1,\"Contype\",\"GPRS\"");
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
myserial.println("AT+SAPBR=3,1,\"APN\",\"www\"");//APN
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
myserial.println("AT+SAPBR=1,1");
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
myserial.println("AT+SAPBR=2,1");
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
//---------------------------------
}
void loop() {
// put your main code here, to run repeatedly:
inti;
for (i = 0; i< 20; i++)
{
flow_meter();
}
temperature();
turbidity();
delay(1000);
gsm();
}
voidflow_meter()
{
if ((millis() - oldTime) > 1000) // Only process counters once per second
{
// Disable the interrupt while calculating flow rate and sending the value to
// the host
detachInterrupt(sensorInterrupt);
// Because this loop may not complete in exactly 1 second intervals we calculate
// the number of milliseconds that have passed since the last execution and use
// that to scale the output. We also apply the calibrationFactor to scale the output
// based on the number of pulses per second per units of measure (litres/minute in
// this case) coming from the sensor.
flowRate = ((1000.0 / (millis() - oldTime)) * pulseCount) / calibrationFactor;
// Note the time this processing pass was executed. Note that because we've
// disabled interrupts the millis() function won't actually be incrementing right
// at this point, but it will still return the value it was set to just before
// interrupts went away.
oldTime = millis();
// Divide the flow rate in litres/minute by 60 to determine how many litres have
// passed through the sensor in this 1 second interval, then multiply by 1000 to
// convert to millilitres.
flowMilliLitres = (flowRate / 60) * 1000;
// Add the millilitres passed in this second to the cumulative total
totalMilliLitres += flowMilliLitres;
// Print the flow rate for this second in litres / minute
/* Serial.print("Flow rate: ");
Serial.print(int(flowRate)); // Print the integer part of the variable
Serial.print("."); // Print the decimal point */
// Determine the fractional part. The 10 multiplier gives us 1 decimal place.
frac = (flowRate - int(flowRate)) * 10;
Serial.print(frac, DEC) ; // Print the fractional part of the variable
Serial.println("L/min");
/* // Print the number of litres flowed in this second
Serial.print(" Current Liquid Flowing: "); // Output separator
Serial.print(flowMilliLitres);
Serial.print("mL/Sec");
// Print the cumulative total of litres flowed since starting
Serial.print(" Output Liquid Quantity: "); // Output separator
Serial.print(totalMilliLitres);
Serial.println("mL"); */
if ( tempTotal != totalMilliLitres ) {
tempTotal = totalMilliLitres;
// displayVolumeOfWater(totalMilliLitres );
}
// Reset the pulse counter so we can start incrementing again
pulseCount = 0;
// Enable the interrupt again now that we've finished sending output
attachInterrupt(sensorInterrupt, pulseCounter, FALLING);
}
//=========================================================================================================================
}
voidpulseCounter()
{
// Increment the pulse counter
pulseCount++;
}
//-------------------------------------------------------------------------
void temperature()
{
sensors.requestTemperatures();
Celcius = sensors.getTempCByIndex(0);
Fahrenheit = sensors.toFahrenheit(Celcius);
Serial.print(" C ");
Serial.print(Celcius);
// Serial.print(" F ");
// Serial.println(Fahrenheit);
delay(1000);
}
//------------------------------------------------------------
void turbidity()
{
intsensorValue = analogRead(A0);
voltage = sensorValue * (5.0 / 1024.0);
// Serial.println ("Sensor Output (V):");
Serial.println (voltage);
// Serial.println();
delay(1000);
}
//------------------------------------------------------------
voidgsm()
{
myserial.println("AT+HTTPINIT");
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
myserial.println("AT+HTTPPARA=\"CID\",1");
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
StaticJsonDocument<200>JsonDocument;
JsonObject& object = JsonDocument.createObject();
object.set("TE", Celcius);
object.set("TU", voltage);
object.set("WF", frac);
delay(1000);
object.printTo(Serial);
Serial.println(" ");
String sendtoserver;
object.prettyPrintTo(sendtoserver);
delay(1000);
//myserial.println("AT+HTTPPARA=\"URL\",\"https://api.thingspeak.com/update?api_key=\""); //Server address
myserial.println("AT+HTTPPARA=\"URL\",\"https://api.thingspeak.com/update?api_key=\""); //Server address
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
myserial.println("AT+HTTPPARA=\"CONTENT\",\"application/json\"");
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
myserial.println("AT+HTTPDATA=" + String(sendtoserver.length()) + ",100000");
Serial.println(sendtoserver);
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
myserial.println(sendtoserver);
delay(2000);
ShowSerialData;
myserial.println("AT+HTTPACTION=1");
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
myserial.println("AT+HTTPREAD");
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData();
myserial.println("AT+HTTPTERM");
delay(1000);
ShowSerialData;
}
voidShowSerialData()
{
while (myserial.available() != 0)
Serial.write(myserial.read());
delay(1000);
}
Need code to collect data of waterflow sensor using ESP 8266 and to stoe it in ThingSpeak cloud
Ciao a Tutti,qualche mese fa avevo costruito una stazione meteo con un esp32 e vari sensori.
Tutto funzionava, adesso però ho riprovato, e non funziona più. Ho provato a creare un canale nuovo con nuovo ID canale, nuovo ID Client, nuovo Utente (uguale al Client) e nuova Password. si connette (ho inserito un comando se connesso a MQTT scrivi.....) ma non publica i dati.
Non reisco a saltarne fuori, ècambiato qualche cosa?
grazie a tutti
Currently, according to the official documentation, "DisplayName" only supports character vectors or single scalar string as input. For example, when plotting three variables simultaneously, if I use a single scalar string as input, the legend labels will all be the same. To have different labels, I need to specify them separately using the legend function with label1, label2, label3.
Here's an example illustrating the issue:
x = (1:10)';
y1 = x;
y2 = x.^2;
y3 = x.^3;
% Plotting with a string scalar for DisplayName
figure;
plot(x, [y1,y2,y3], DisplayName="y = x");
legend;
% To have different labels, I need to use the legend function separately
figure;
plot(x, [y1,y2,y3], DisplayName=["y = x","y = x^2","y=x^3"]);
Error using plot
Value must be a character vector or a string scalar.
% legend("y = x","y = x^2","y=x^3");
Hello,
could it be that there is currently is a stability problem with the MQTT-Broker? I can establisth a connection successfully using the MQTTX client (web and win64 installation). I tried all possible ports an connection types. It disconnects all the time after a few seconds of establishing a connection successfully. So it was not possible to subscribe any item. I do not think the problem is in my side... By the way, protocol verision 3.1.1 ist supported, 5.0 not, am I right?
Maybe you could give me a hint,
Best regards,
Manfred
Three former MathWorks employees, Steve Wilcockson, David Bergstein, and Gareth Thomas, joined the ArrayCast pod cast to discuss their work on array based languages. At the end of the episode, Steve says,
> It's a little known fact about MATLAB. There's this thing, Gareth has talked about the community. One of the things MATLAB did very, very early was built the MATLAB community, the so-called MATLAB File Exchange, which came about in the early 2000s. And it was where people would share code sets, M files, et cetera. This was long before GitHub came around. This was well ahead of its time. And I think there are other places too, where MATLAB has delivered cultural benefits over and above the kind of core programming and mathematical capabilities too. So, you know, MATLAB Central, File Exchange, very much saw the future.
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson
Last activity on 28 Sep 2025 at 22:40

This topic is for discussing highlights to the current R2025a Pre-release.
So you've downloaded the R2025a pre-release, tried Dark mode and are wondering what else is new. A lot! A lot is new!
One thing I am particularly happy about is the fact that Apple Accelerate is now the default BLAS on Apple Silicon machines. Check it out by doing
>> version -blas
ans =
'Apple Accelerate BLAS (ILP64)'
If you compare this to R2024b that is using OpenBLAS you'll see some dramatic speed-ups in some areas. For example, I saw up to 3.7x speed-up for matrix-matrix multiplication on my M2 Mabook Pro and 2x faster LU factorisation.
Details regarding my experiments are in this blog post Life in the fast lane: Making MATLAB even faster on Apple Silicon with Apple Accelerate » The MATLAB Blog - MATLAB & Simulink . Back then you had to to some trickery to switch to Apple Accelerate, now its the default.
Steve Eddins
Steve Eddins
Last activity on 16 Jan 2025

I just published a blog post called "The Story of TIMEIT." I've been thinking about writing something like this ever since Mike Croucher's tic/toc blog post last spring.
There were a lot of opinions about TIMEIT expressed in the comments of that blog post, including some of mine.
My blog post today gives a more full history of the function, its design goals, and how it works. I thought it might prompt more discussion, so I'm creating this thread as a place for it.
If you are an interested user of TIMEIT, feel free to weigh in here with your thoughts. Perhaps the thread will influence MathWorks regarding what to do with TIMEIT, or with related performance measurement capabilities.
Hi
If you have used the playground and are familiar with its capabilities, I will be very interested in your opinion about the tool.
Thank you in advance for your reply/opinion.
At
Hi everyone
The R2025a pre-release is now available to licensed users. I highly encourage you to download, give it a try and give us some feedback.
The first thing I tried was switching to Dark mode. Here's the magic
>> s = settings;
>> s.matlab.appearance.MATLABTheme.PersonalValue = "Dark";
in the below code write is working fine, but read is failing ( 404 error) can you please help me reslove this.
/*
Go to thingspeak.com and create an account if you don't have one already.
After logging in, click on the "New Channel" button to create a new channel for your data. This is where your data will be stored and displayed.
Fill in the Name, Description, and other fields for your channel as desired, then click the "Save Channel" button.
Take note of the "Write API Key" located in the "API keys" tab, this is the key you will use to send data to your channel.
Replace the channelID from tab "Channel Settings" and privateKey with "Read API Keys" from "API Keys" tab.
Replace the host variable with the thingspeak server hostname "api.thingspeak.com"
Upload the sketch to your ESP32 board and make sure that the board is connected to the internet. The ESP32 should now send data to your Thingspeak channel at the intervals specified by the loop function.
Go to the channel view page on thingspeak and check the "Field1" for the new incoming data.
You can use the data visualization and analysis tools provided by Thingspeak to display and process your data in various ways.
Please note, that Thingspeak accepts only integer values.
You can later check the values at https://thingspeak.com/channels/2005329
Please note that this public channel can be accessed by anyone and it is possible that more people will write their values.
*/
#include <WiFi.h>
const char *ssid = "xxxx"; // Change this to your WiFi SSID
const char *password = "xxxxx"; // Change this to your WiFi password
const char *host = "api.thingspeak.com"; // This should not be changed
const int httpPort = 80; // This should not be changed
const String channelID = "2805914"; // Change this to your channel ID
const String writeApiKey = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"; // Change this to your Write API key
const String readApiKey = "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"; // Change this to your Read API key
// The default example accepts one data filed named "field1"
// For your own server you can ofcourse create more of them.
int field1 = 20;
//int field1 = 20;
int numberOfResults = 1; // Number of results to be read
int fieldNumber = 1; // Field number which will be read out
void setup() {
Serial.begin(115200);
while (!Serial) {
delay(100);
}
// We start by connecting to a WiFi network
Serial.println();
Serial.println("******************************************************");
Serial.print("Connecting to ");
Serial.println(ssid);
WiFi.begin(ssid, password);
while (WiFi.status() != WL_CONNECTED) {
delay(500);
Serial.print(".");
}
Serial.println("");
Serial.println("WiFi connected");
Serial.println("IP address: ");
Serial.println(WiFi.localIP());
}
void readResponse(NetworkClient *client) {
unsigned long timeout = millis();
while (client->available() == 0) {
if (millis() - timeout > 5000) {
Serial.println(">>> Client Timeout !");
client->stop();
return;
}
}
// Read all the lines of the reply from server and print them to Serial
while (client->available()) {
String line = client->readStringUntil('\r');
Serial.print(line);
}
Serial.printf("\nClosing connection\n\n");
}
void loop() {
NetworkClient client;
String footer = String(" HTTP/1.1\r\n") + "Host: " + String(host) + "\r\n" + "Connection: close\r\n\r\n";
// WRITE --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
if (!client.connect(host, httpPort)) {
return;
}
client.print("GET /update?api_key=" + writeApiKey + "&field1=" + field1 + footer);
readResponse(&client);
delay(200);
// READ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
String readRequest = "GET /channels/" + channelID + "/fields/" + fieldNumber + ".json?results=" + numberOfResults + " HTTP/1.1\r\n" + "Host: " + host + "\r\n"
+ "Connection: close\r\n\r\n";
if (!client.connect(host, httpPort)) {
return;
}
client.print(readRequest);
readResponse(&client);
// -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
//++field1;
delay(10000);
}
The Most Accepted Badge and Top Downloads Badge are two prestigious annual honors that recognize outstanding contributions in MATLAB Answers and File Exchange.
Most Accepted badge is awarded to the top 10 contributors whose answers received the most acceptances. Top Downloads badge goes to the top 10 contributors with the highest number of downloads for their submissions. Please note that, starting in 2025, the criteria for Top Downloaded Badge in will be adjusted to only count downloads from files created or updated in 2025.
In 2024, the recipients for Most Accepted are: @Voss, @Walter Roberson, @Star Strider, @Torsten, @Matt J, @Stephen23, @Steven Lord, @Hassaan, @Sam Chak, and @Cris LaPierre.
Congratulations and thank you again for your outstanding contributions in 2024!
Thingspeak
Thingspeak channel shows a "watch" - "un-watch" selection box. What does this do?
Thanks