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HiL simulation using Simulink but without a Speedgoat® target machine
Riccardo Spartà
on 13 Nov 2023
Latest activity Edit by Walter Roberson
on 14 Nov 2023
Hi everyone,
I would like to ask you if it would be possible to do an HiL simulation using an environment model simulated via Simulink and load in a target computer connected to the hardware needed. The target computer will be simply a laptop with Matlab&Simulink package installed and directly connected to the bench to test.
I have found some solutions about the use of Simulink Real-Time but it implies the use of a Speedgoat unit, so I was wondering if anyone has ever done it without that device.
Thank you very much.
3 Comments
You can do it if you use a sufficiently old version of MATLAB. Somewhere approximately R2017b Simulink Real-Time switched to supporting only speedgoat.
However, the controlling computer would have to be running one of the few real-time operating systems that were supported back then. RDOS or something like that (I do not recall whether QNX was supported then... I don't think so).
And there were always a fairly restricted set of supported hardware devices. I seem to recall that only a small number of different ethernet controllers were supported, and it is quite unlikely that your current laptop is using one of those controllers, so if you needed ethernet you would have to create custom drivers. Without any support as the non-Speedgoat versions of Simulink Real-Time have aged out of support.
Basically, you cannot hope to take a Windows machine and run it as a "hard real-time" system -- not unless you have contacts with the US Navy and manage to snag a copy of the real-time version of Windows NT that is used to control battleships. If "soft real-time" is good enough for your purposes, then recently Windows 10 Enterprise added some facilities: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/soft-real-time/soft-real-time
If I understand correctly, there are some real-time Linux distributions; I do not know how up-to-date they are kept.