MATLAB Timer Function w/ Compiler

Here is the scenerio I am running into. I have a GUI with a start/stop button and an "indicator status light" that controls the start/stop of a timer function. If the light is red when the button is pushed then the timer is not running and it executes "SimTimerFcn" to start the timer. If it is green - it knows it needs to stop the timer and does that. The timer calls another funtion which looks at the contents of a folder to find files it needs to process. All this works great within MATLAB but when it complies it does not work... it seems like its not even trying to run the first iteration. I have tried wait and waitfor and nothing seems to be working... any ideas? I assume I am putting the wait statement in the wrong place or something but this one as thrown me for a loop. Thanks!

[Geoff Hayes]

Chris - when you run the above (from the compiled version) does the indicator status turn green? What are watchdir and writedir set to? Are they full paths to the directories/folders of interest or are they relative to the running executable? How does the timer know about these directories?

[Chris Yerges]

Yes it turns green.

When the timer executes "SimProcessMetrics" it compares files in both directories (which could be the same) to find files to process. Its basically reading in a data file... calculating metrics... then writing a metric tab delimited file. All this works great in MATLAB directly. I just cant get the timer to run in the complied version. Every ieration it is supposed to write to the "status" and its not even doing that for 1 iteration so I dont think its even trying to start the timer.

[Chris Yerges]

I just tried to put a msg box as the first line of 'SimProcessMetrics' and nothing happens so its not even firing the timer code for the first check it seems

[Geoff Hayes]

Does SimTimerFcn get called? And again, how does SimProcessMetrics know what directories to look in? And is the code providing the full paths to these directories?

[Chris Yerges]

I dont think it is... someting is not letting the timer get created or something under the complied condition. SimProcessMetrics gets the directories from the handles of the GUI on its own.... its not passed. The directories have nothing to do with the issue.

I converted the code to use a while loop to run SimProcessMetrics and it appears to be working so Im moving on for now but Id like to figure out what is causing the issue in the timer function.

[Geoff Hayes]

I wonder if this https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/283132-timer-does-not-work-in-the-exe-file#answer_221301 is the problem. You are creating a local variable timer in the SimTimerFcn and then as soon as that function completes, the timer is deleted. You may want to save the timer to the hMainGUI_Handles structure. So your SimTimerFcn code might look like

function SimTimerFcn

hMainGUI = getappdata(0, 'hMainGUI');
hMainGUI_handles = getappdata(0, 'hMainGUI_handles');
hMainGUI_handles.timer = timer;
% etc.
setappdata(0,'hMainGUI_handles', hMainGUI_handles);
start(hMainGUI_handles.timer);

Or something similar to that (I'm not sure if all the syntax is correct...)

You could also move the SimTimerFcn code to the SimStartStop function where you would already have access to the hMainGUI_handles.