MNS UNIVERSITY OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY,

MATLAB INTRO
Lab Experiment #1

Name: _______________________________________________________ Roll No: _________________

Score: _______________ Signature of the Lab Tutor: _______________________ Date: ______________

Lab 1
An Introduction to MATLAB

1. What is MATLAB:dicussion.

The name MATLAB is short for MATrix LABoratory. It is a commercial software package
whose main function is to perform calculations on matrices, row vectors and column vectors.
It is widely used in both industry and academic institutions. It possesses many of the features
of a high level, numerically oriented programming language, but in addition has a large
collection of built-in functions for performing matrix and vector operations in a way that is
very simple for the user. For example, to find the determinant of a matrix A one need only
enter:
det(A)
MATLAB commands can be entered one line at a time, or the user can write programs of
MATLAB code and define his or her own functions. In this session, we shall only use the
one-line-at-a-time “interpretive” mode for simplicity, but the regular user will find that the
power of the package is considerably extended by writing his or her own programs and
functions.

2. Objectives

The objectives of these notes are to give a brief general introduction to MATLAB and to
familiarize you with the most commonly used functions of MATLAB.
The notes contain exercises that you should try out as you go along and are intended to be
reasonably self-contained. However, the MATLAB manuals contain tutorial introductions
and there are built-in demonstrations and tutorial material in the MATLAB software itself. At
present MATLAB version 6.1 is available. However, on our computers, MATLAB version
5.3 has been installed.

3. Entering and quitting MATLAB

To enter MATLAB, simply double click on the MATLAB icon. To leave MATLAB and
return to the PC’s operating system
simply type
quit

4. Creating and manipulating matrices and vectors

MATLAB works on matrices and vectors that may be real or complex. Variables do not have
to be “declared”. Results can be displayed in a variety of different formats.
Let us enter a row vector into the MATLAB workspace. Type in:

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 MNS UNIVERSITY OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY,
MATLAB INTRO
Lab Experiment #1
v = [2 4 7 5]
This creates a variable v whose current value is a row vector with four elements as shown.
After pressing “return” the value of v will have been echoed back to you. To suppress the
echo, one uses a semi-colon following the command line. Thus
w = [1 3 8 9];
Creates another row vector w, but does not echo. To check that w has appeared in the
MATLAB workspace, type,
who
Which will display all the variables in the MATLAB workspace, and to check the value of w
simply type w
Operations on row vectors can be best illustrated by some simple exercises.

Exercise 1: Investigate the effect of the following commands:

One way to generate a column vector is to take the transpose of a row vector, as you will
have found in exercise 1(f). Column vectors can be typed in directly in one of two ways. For
example, to enter the command vector

you can type

Exercise 2: Investigate the effect of the following commands

(i) z’ (b) z*v (c) [v; w] (d) v*z (e) [z; v’] (f) z + v’
One way of creating matrices is by multiplying row and column vectors as seen in the above
exercises. There are various ways of entering matrices. For example, to enter the matrix

the most obvious ways are to type

Exercise 3
Investigate the effect of the following commands:

(a) N = inv(M) (b) M*N (c) I = eye(2) (d) M + I (e) M*z(1:2) (f) v(3:4)*M
(g) M(1,1) (h) M(1:2,1:2) (i) M(:,1) (j) M(2,:)

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 MNS UNIVERSITY OF ENGINEERING & TECHNOLOGY,
MATLAB INTRO
Lab Experiment #1

5. Built-in Functions and MATLAB help

You have already encountered some built-in functions. In addition to standard arithmetic
operators, such as “+” and “*”, you have met inv(A) that generates the inverse of A, and
eye(n) that generates the n-by-n identity matrix. MATLAB has a very large number of built-
in functions. To see the full list of those variables on your machine type
help
To get information on a specific function (“inv” for example) type
help inv
The help command is very useful. Most of the MATLAB built-in functions have very
descriptive names and are easily remembered or guessed.

Exercise 4:
Use the help command to find out about the following built-in functions and make up
your own simple examples:
1. ones 2. zeros 3. det 4. Linspace 5. Logspace

6. Graphs
The results of signal processing computations in MATLAB are huge matrices containing, for
example, frequency responses, which one would like to display in graphical form. We will go
through a simple example of generating data, plotting the graph, putting labels on the axes
etc.
We will plot the graph of
y = sin(t);
for t going from 0 to 20 seconds. First we need to generate a vector t containing the values of
time that we want to use. Type:
t=linspace(0,20,100);
which makes t into a row vector of 100 values from 0 to 20 inclusive. Then type
ys = sin(t);
To plot the set of points type:
Plot(t,ys)
The basic graph can be prettied up using the following self explanatory sequence of
commands:
xlabel(‘Time in seconds’)
ylabel(‘sin(t)’)
title(‘your Roll No.’)
grid

More than one set of points can be plotted on the same axes, and more than one graph can be
displayed on the screen at once.
The following exercise leads you though this:

Exercise 5:
1. Generate a vector yc containing the values of cos(t) for the same time range as
before.
2. From the “help” entry for “plot” find out how to get both ys and yc plotted against t
on the same axis.
3. From the “help” entry for “subplot” find out how to plot ys and yc plotted on two
separate graphs, one above the other.