Creating User Interfaces

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Table of Contents > QUARC > User's Guide

QUARC currently supports three methods of creating GUI's: MATLAB, Altia, and Quanser's Visualization block set.

QUARC may be used along with MATLAB's GUI creation tools to create graphical user interfaces quickly and easily. Familiarity with MATLAB and the interpretive environment make this option a powerful way to develop full-featured GUIs rapidly. However, while MATLAB GUIs are simple to design, GUIs created with MATLAB require the Simulink diagram to be connected in external mode (although the GUI itself can establish that connection invisibly) and cannot be deployed independent of MATLAB.

For professional applications, where it is not desirable to deploy MATLAB on the end-user's system, QUARC provides an interface to Altia Design. Altia Design is a very powerful third-party tool for creating professional quality standalone GUIs for industrial applications. QUARC provides a simple but flexible interface to Altia GUIs that allows you to control and monitor a real-time application developed with QUARC using an Altia GUI.

Finally, Quansers Visualization blocks provide a simple means to create a 3D visualization of your simulation or real-time model. This provides a similar function to Mathwork's Simulink 3D Animation Toolkit, but with superior performance for large meshes, remote access with multiple clients, and multiple interface blocks. It has also been optimized to work cooperatively with real-time code such that your controller will take priority over the visualization. Unlike Altia or Matlab GUI's, these blocks do not provide a means to directly provide user input back to your model, but it can be used in conjunction with either of these interfaces or using the QUARC Host Keyboard, Host Mouse or Host Joystick blocks.

These three methods of creating GUI's are discussed in detail in the following pages. Click on the links to get more information.

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