I had some great questions from the “Reader request” post. Today I will set about answering the first batch, the hardware questions.
Why is hardware hard? Does it need to be?
There were a set of questions connected to targeting specific hardware, e.g. how to generate the most efficient code for your hardware. Within the MATLAB / Simulink tool chain there are 3 primary tasks:
Configuring the target board
The first step is to configure the target hardware through the hardware configuration menu. This defines the word size and ending nature of the target hardware.
Calling hardware devices
MATLAB and Simulink are not designed for the development of low level device drivers for physical hardware. However they are wonderful environments for integrating through defined API’s calls to physical hardware. The recommended best practice is to create interface blocks, often masked to configure the call to the API, which route the signal from the Simulink model to the low level device driver
Another best practice is to separate the IO blocks from the algorithmic code, e.g. create Input Subsystems and Output Subsystems. This allows for simulation without the need to “dummy” or “stub” out the IO blocks.
Make it go fast!
The final topic is deeper than the scope of this project; how to optimize the generated code. Assuming an appropriate configuration set has been selected the next step is to use board specific libraries. Hardware vendors often create highly optimized algorithms for a subset of their mathematical functionality. Embedded Coder can leverage those libraries though the Code Replacement utilities. One thing of note, if this approach is taken then a PIL test should be performed to verify that the simulated behavior of the mathematical operation and the replacement library are a match.
