Need help with interactive GUI application

I am very novice to GUI development and I need some help/suggestions with writing an application using App Designer that does following at high-level:

1. Periodically checks a local folder for "new" data. This function sleeps for few seconds between the checks.
2. When new data is found, it is combined with earlier data and some image and signal processing is performed on the combined data.
3. Results of the processing (eg: graphs, images etc.) are shown in a GUI to the user. This includs updating graphs/image with new data, showing new processed outputs etc.
4. The UI should be interactive to allow user to dive deeper into the data (eg: zooming into graphs, images; looking at details of previous time point). In addition, user may also change few variables/parameters for the processing in #2, which should reprocess all data with new parameters.

I have sort of implemented everything in GUIDE, but it is far from perfect. For example, when user interacts with UI (#4 above) all other processes are halted. Or when #2 is running, UI is not interactive and new data (#1) is not checked.

In my limited understanding, it seems that above behavior is result of everything running in just one computational thread. We are planning to migrate to App Designer and wanted to take this opportunity to change the implementation to address the current behavior. Also, in future we may change #1 to directly use UDP sockets to receive the new data.

Are there any suggestions of how I should go about implementing this type of application? Any toy examples and suggestions would be highly appreciated. We are currently using Matlab 2020b but can switch to more recent version, if that has the needed functionality.

Answer 1

[SACHIN KHANDELWAL]

Hi @CBhushan,

Here are some steps that might be helpful to you:

1. User MATLAB's timer function to periodically check for new data in a folder.
2. you can use MATLAB's perfeval or backgroundpool for async processing of data.
3. utilize the udpport to use UDP sockets.