animation - Real time plot in MATLAB

Question

I'm very new to MATLAB and I was trying to display a real time plot of some calculations. I have an N sized vector and I work with m values at a time (say m = N/4), so I want to plot the first m values and then as soon as the second m values are calculated have them replace the first plot.

My approach was as follows:

for i=1:N,
  ...
  //compute m
  ...
  plot(m);
end;

but it fails to update the plot in every loop and waits for all the loops to finish to plot the data. My question is: Should I use another function instead of plot or could I add some delay in each loop?

I think there must be a way I'm not aware of for updating the plot instead of re-plotting it every time.

Answer 1

As Edric mentioned, you'll definitely want to include a drawnow command after the call to plot to force an update of the graphics. However, there is a much more efficient and smoother method to animate plots that doesn't involve recreating the entire plot each time. You can simply initialize your plot, capture a handle to the plot object, then modify the properties of that object in your loop using the set command. Here's an example:

hLine = plot(nan);         % Initialize a plot line (which isn't displayed yet
                           %   because the values are NaN)
for i = 1:N                % Loop N times
  ...
  % Compute m here
  ...
  set(hLine, 'YData', m);  % Update the y data of the line
  drawnow                  % Force the graphics to update immediately
end

In addition, before your loop and after the call to plot you can set a number of axes properties, like the axes limits, etc., if you want the axes to stay fixed and not change their appearance with each new vector m that is plotted.