We have developed an Arduino program for the control of a sophisticated physical system. The system is not yet built and we want to verify in order to validate that this Arduino program can control efficiently the intended physical system.

The third party application then simulate the physical system and should interact with the board for the control of the system. Once this simulation is valid, the real system would be well control by the Arduino board.

Shortly, the aim is to validate the process control using an Arduino board, without the physical system.

I didn't get your intention from the original question.But if your aim is to "... simulate the physical system ...", an approach abbreviated HIL (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware-in-the-loop_simulation ) should suit your needs.

Such HIL systems are available in the form of dedicated test systems. An alternative would be to build your own HIL. In this case, NI (National Instruments) hardware components are prevailing these days: D/A and digital outputs to simulate sensors, A/D and digital inputs to acquire the control signals from the Arduino. Though not mandatory, the programming is often done in NI LabView. But APIs to C/++/# etc. are available as well.

Hope this helps to start ...

Dear Gerard,

The respected colleague U.Dreher answered your question. As i am interested in the solution of this problem, i searched for its solution and came across the topic: Adding third party boards to Arduino. There is a new board manager. You can follow the topic in the link:https://learn.adafruit.com/add-boards-arduino-v164/overview

Best wishes

You can try to use Matlab/Simulink for this task.

https://www.mathworks.com/hardware-support/arduino-matlab.html

http://playground.arduino.cc/Interfacing/Matlab

MATLAB and Simulink also provide the support package that you can interact with Arduino board.

You should try.

Thanks very much for your orientations

The Matlab/Simulink solution is really appropriate and powerrful

you can use Simulink as posted above or you can use .m code in matlab. I personaly prefer .m code because it gives more freedom to the user. for example here is a program that sends a number to arduino and arduino receives the number multiply it by 2 and sends it back to matlab:

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%   matlab code   %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

s=serial ('COM19', 'BaudRate' , 9600); %bulid serial port to arduino port com19

fopen(s); %open the serial port

A=input('please enter val : '); %get the value

feed=[num2str(A)];

fprintf(s,feed); %send A to arduino

B=str2num(fscanf(s)); %get the multiplied value from arduino

fclose (s); %close the serial port

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

%%%%%%%%%%%   arduino code %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

int val;

void setup() {

Serial.begin(9600); // initialize the serial port:

}

void loop() {

while (Serial.available() == 0) ; // Wait here until input buffer has a character

{

val=Serial.parseInt(); // receive number A from matlab and save it in integer val

}

val=val*2; // multiply val by 2

Serial.println(val); // send back the multiplied value to matlab

delay(1000);

}

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%