Pause and IPC in SKILL

Hi,

I would like my SKILL program to halt for a few seconds while I wait for
a MATLAB program to write some data to a file that are to be accessed by
the SKILL script. Currently I solve the task by letting the SKILL script
try to access the file continuously while the MATLAB program executes.
However, this is a dirty solution and it steals a lot of CPU time so
there must be some better solution. Any suggestions?

I also have a more general question. Is there a better way, than using
temporary files, to pass data between MATLAB and SKILL? I have looked
briefly at IPC in the manual. However, since the SKILL script is the
slave process I would like MATLAB to be in control of things I do not
want to start MATLAB as a child process to the SKILL script. Is there
some way to "hook-up" with a process that is already running?

Best regards,
Emil Hjalmarson

 

A possibility: make skill read a named pipe and MATLAB write to it.

Yours,

 

You could use sleep(), but that freezes up the tools

You could try writing a program which is just a pause, then using
ipcBeginProcess and ipcWait to halt your skill code, I'm not sure if
that would work though.

In the past I have used a C program launched with ipcSkillProcess to
periodically run a skill command, but I don't think that would be useful
here.

You could try looking at a previous posting
(http://groups.google.com/group/comp...49650fa90?q=simvision&rnum=1#131e35149650fa90)
Andrew's code there might be of use, if you can somehow implement the
tcl bits in MATLAB. I'm unsure whether it would be worth the effort though.

Hope this helps

Doug

 

I was just about to post exactly the same thing!

You could of course use the Tcl code, and then fire off something from Matlab
which calls the skillClient command - so that would minimise the amount of
rewriting for Matlab - but it's a bit messy with extra scripts in the way.

Regards,

Andrew.