Desktop Sonar Topography: Radar with Simulink

Standard Arduino radar projects use the "Processing" IDE to draw the green screen. The Arduino Radar with Simulink catapults the engineering into the elite, professional-grade world. MATLAB Simulink is used by aerospace engineers array mathematics. This project forces the Arduino to operate purely as an incredibly fast hardware DAQ (Data Acquisition) slave, executing sweeping Sonar arrays and continuously firing absolute Serial strings directly into the crushing processing power of a MATLAB desktop simulation block!

The Microcontroller Sweep Loop (The Data Pipeline)

The Uno is strapped to an HC-SR04 Sonar Component glued directly onto an SG90 Micro Servo.

1. The Uno does no visual graphics. It acts as an absolute data pipeline mechanism!
2. The loop() uses a standard for loop to sweep the Servo from 15 to 165 degrees.
3. At exactly every single degree step, it triggers the Sonar pulseIn()!
4. The Strict Buffer Execution: Simulink cannot read human text like Angle: 20, Distance: 15. It will crash. It demands massive, comma-delimited string parsing blocks perfectly terminated!

Serial.print(currentAngle);
Serial.print(",");
Serial.print(distanceCM); 
Serial.print("."); // The absolute delimiter character that Simulink awaits!

• The Uno fires this string sequence dynamically 50 times a second up the USB COM port!

The MATLAB Simulink Receiving Architecture

The heavy lifting is done explicitly on the massive PC architecture running MATLAB.

• The user builds a graphical node-block diagram in Simulink!
• They drag in a "Serial Receive Block" tied to COM4 / 9600 Baud!
• The Cartesian Trigonometry Math: The data arriving is exactly Polar Variables (Angle and Radius). Simulink must mathematically convert this! x = distance * cos(theta) y = distance * sin(theta)
• The massive Simulink engine dumps these exact X/Y coordinates immediately into an absolute Scatter Plot graph widget, creating a terrifyingly brilliant, sweeping green Radar arc that detects human hands dynamically exactly tracking like a submarine!

Aerospace Diagnostic Software and Gear

• Arduino Uno/Nano (Standard execution speeds are perfectly sufficient).
• SG90 Micro Servo + HC-SR04 Sonar Component Module.
• MATLAB and the Simulink Support Package for Arduino Hardware (A massive software installation required on the host PC!).
• Custom 3D Printed Sonar Mount Bracket (If the Sonar shifts microscopically while sweeping, the Cartesian math plotted in Simulink will skew radically sideways!).