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The Real Time Toolbox brings the power of MATLAB and Simulink to the real world. It allows you to access external analog and digital signals, with almost no hardware knowledge. You can experiment with control system design, signal processing, data acquisition and similar tasks directly from the Simulink environment using powerful block library without the need to use any additional tool. Based on a high performance real-time kernel and drivers for popular A/D and D/A boards, the Real Time Toolbox is your interface to real-time and data acquisition capabilities of your computer.

The real-time simulation is one of the most challenging tasks. Yet it is incredibly easy with the Real Time Toolbox: you just create a simulation diagram as you would normally do in Simulink, add one or more real-time blocks from the Real Time Toolbox library and that's it!

Your data acquisition board is represented by an Adapter block, which allows modifying board configuration. The inputs and outputs are represented by input and output blocks, and a different sampling period can be specified for each I/O block. This enables creating multirate simulations, control loops and signal processing applications.

Such real-time simulation diagrams preserve most of the Simulink advantages, such as fully interactive work, extreme ease of use and 100% compatibility with Stateflow and blocksets. Wide range of simple, buffered, frame-based and triggered blocks with different I/O functionality offers the best solution for different applications. Depending on model complexity usual applications are able to run at sampling rates between 100 Hz - 25 kHz and are suitable for most laboratory experiments.

To achieve the best real-time performance model execution priority can be set using the new RT Simulink Process control block.

One of the most difficult tasks while getting a data acquisition experiment ready is to correctly set all the hardware options of the data acquisition board. The Real Time Toolbox simplifies this as much as possible: the only thing you need to do is to set the board parameters in the driver's GUI, and if you use your board with factory-default settings you don't need to change anything at all.

Block GUI offers easy to use environment for setting I/O type, channels, ranges, engineering units and other parameters.

Frame based I/O blocks with direct connectivity to frame signal processing blocks are available for all peripheral types including also counters, encoders and digital I/O. Channel assignment has been simplified and improved over previous versions significantly. It is easy and self-explanatory with channels divided into groups and with independent channel numbering for each board and peripheral type.

A wide range of industry standard data acquisition boards and other peripherals is supported, including those manufactured by Advantech, Analog Devices, Axiom, Data Translation, Humusoft, ICP DAS, Keithley MetraByte, Measurement Computing, or National Instruments.

Besides standard analog and digital I/O many specialized devices like a stepping motor controller, quadrature encoders, counters, PWM, mouse or joystick are also supported. Multiple boards of the same or different type can be used simultaneously to offer sufficient I/O even for complex industrial applications.