(Odd) GUI slider behavior

Hello everyone. I could not find an answer to this specific question about the MATLAB slider.

I am using a slider to control values for capacitors, inductors, and resistors in a lumped-element circuit model. The capacitance values range from about e-12 up to e-6 Farads(for example). I need to be able to make the capacitance very small in order to represent a biological membrane with very little compliance.

So, I set the min to e-12 and max to e-6. And I set the slider step to 0.01. I have tried different step values, but the following issue does not change: the behavior of the slider is different at different locations along the slider. The left-most 1/6 portion of the slider covers about e-12 to e-8, while the next 1/6 portion covers about e-8 to e-7, and the the remaining 2/3 of the slider covers the range of e-7 to e-6. Why does the incremental change remain constant across the entire slider? I cannot make fine adjustments to the slider value at the left side like I can at the right side.

Thank you.

Answer 1

[Eric Lin]

Assuming the information you provided is correct, your step size is greater than the range of your slider. In newer releases of MATLAB (I tried in R2014b), MATLAB will throw a warning and refuse to render the slider if the step size is greater than the Min-Max range of the slider.

[Peter Bowers]

I originally ran into this issue, but corrected this. This behavior seems to be independent of that, as it continues even after I have changed the step size. The step size changes; it is exponential as opposed to constant over the entire range of the slider.