A Pattern to Serialize a Simulink Bus.

Hi there,

I have the mother of Simulink busses. It contains other nested busses and just to make stuff interessting some arrays of busses. Ultimately I would like to send the buss over a UDP link.

My question is, "Is the a generic pattern to convert busses to a character stream?" Would I would not like is to change some blocks every time I change the bus definition or use S-functions or a MATLAB-function block.

For extra browny points the edianess of the data being streamed should be considered.

Thanx Petri

Answer 1

[Kaustubha Govind]

This may not work for you since you seem to have a non-virtual bus, but I just wanted to throw it out there. If you could convert your nonvirtual bus to a virtual bus, you might be able to utilize the Bus To Vector block. (Note: You mentioned using arrays of buses - these cannot be virtual AFAIK)

[Petri]

Hi Kaustubha,

Your right, my bus is non-virtual. I have tried something in that direction.

I use a Signal Conversion block to convert non-virtual to virtual, then that is connected to a Bus To Vector. Here all matrices have to converted to vectors otherwise signal sizes can not be propigated. However I can't seems to get around the issues that IBus to Vector block input port cannot accept mixed data types. I've we can resolve that then I have a solution.

Thanx Petri

[Kaustubha Govind]

Petri: Perhaps you should use Data Type Conversion blocks to convert your bus elements to be all of the same type? There is no concept of a Simulink vector/matrix having mixed types (like cell-arrays in MATLAB).

Answer 2

[Fabiano Silva]

Hi Petri, I had a similar problem and couldn't find a way to serialize a Simulink non-virtual bus. My solution was extract the signals from the bus with a Bus Selector and then use a Byte Pack block to serialize them. I think it's not the better way to serialize the information in the bus, but it's working well.