Failure to connect Arduino to Matlab (R2019a)

Hi everyone,

I'm struggling to connect to my Arduino using the Arduino Support Package. Some background:

• Matlab version: R2019a
• OS: Windows 10, 64-bit
• Arduino boards tried: Nano v3.2, Nano v3.1, Uno, Sparkfun Redboard, Chinese knock-off Nano (running Nano 3.1 bootloader)

With every board I've tried:

• a = arduino();
• a = arduino('COM4','Uno'); % or the respective port that the board is showing up as in the Device Manager
• a = arduino('COM4','Nano3');

The response to a = arduino(); is always: "Cannot detect Arduino hardware. Make sure Arduino hardware is properly plugged in."

The response to the other two is always: "Cannot program board Uno/Nano3 (COM4). Please make sure the board is supported adn the port and board type are correct. For more information, see Arduino Hardware Troubleshooting."

There are all boards that I can open and program within the Arduino IDE (1.8.12).

Any guidance here?

[Rohan Kale]

Hi Justin,

Can you confirm if the boards that you had mentioned, are clone boards or genuine Arduino boards? If they are clone boards, the connection might be failing due to a bootloader issue, which can be confirmed by enabling the TraceOn option while constructing the arduino object by

a = arduino('COM4', 'Nano3', 'TraceOn', true)

The TraceOn options will enable the debug messages on the command window.

For a clone nano3 board, the workaround is to upload the old Atmega328 bootloader. For getting more information on that, you can contact the MathWorks Technical Support.

Hope it helps

[Justin Riley]

Hi Rohan,

I figured it out through a lot of googling. To first answer your questions, yes it was a genuine Arduino. I experimented with genuines, clones, varying revs (3.1 -> 3.2), and all received the same failure.

Ultimately, the failure was that the default IDERoot was in a location that I did not have read/write access to. I'm not sure why that was the case, but by changing it via:

arduinoio.IDERoot = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino'

...it all worked out.

For what it's worth, I still ended up abandoning the Arduino Support Package as it's just terribly slow in communicating. This application involved driving stepper motors; I've always driven my steppers through custom signals as then you can match the speed/torque curves of your specific motors. This requires creating a signal in the 6-10 kHz range to drive at the rotation rates I was going after (with top speed step toggles generally occuring every 140 uS --- 7.1 kHz). The checks that the package goes through (is the board connected? Are the ports open? Can I send this type of data to the ports?) slows down communication to around 45 ms per command, or 320x slower than I needed.

To work around that, I am treating my arduino just as a normal serial device. It's code is "independent" of Matlab, and listens for strings (i.e. X123Y456Z789) which it then converts into action (Go to position X = 123, Y = 456, Z = 789). It then sends a serial command back to Matlab, which the .m code will then use to call the next function. It proceeds in this ping-pong style through all actions. A bit clunky, but it's the only way I could generate the signal patterns that I needed.

Answer 1

[Justin Riley]

Answering my own question.

Ultimately, the failure was that the default IDERoot was in a location that I did not have read/write access to. It can be changed by the following code:

arduinoio.IDERoot = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino'