Overview

QUARC is an integral part of Quanser’s lab workstations and the comprehensive courseware with Simulink-based lab exercises that accompany them. With QUARC, students’ efforts focus on key control concepts rather than tedious code writing. QUARC user interfaces are easy to understand, which means students do not require any extensive training. They work with controllers that are clear and match standard system block diagrams used in textbooks. Students can tune parameters of the running model by changing block parameters in the Simulink diagram, view the status of a signal in the model and stream data to MATLAB workspace or to a file for off-line analysis.

User Interface

  • Full support for Simulink® external mode, including scopes, floating scopes, displays, to workspace, online parameter tuning, etc.
  • Support for model referencing, allowing modular object-oriented model design and incremental compilation and linking for accelerating the development of large models
  • Support for scope triggering and data archiving for sophisticated, large volume, data collection
  • Log data to MAT-file and M-files
  • Simulink Coder code optimization support
  • Performance diagnostics, e.g., measure of sample time, computation time, elapsed time, etc.
  • Console for monitoring standard I/O (stdio) of a model even on a remote target
  • Ability to interface controllers with MATLAB GUIs, LabVIEW panels, Java GUIs, Altia, etc.
  • Visualization blockset for 3D visualization of simulation or actual hardware in real-time

 

Hardware Interface

  • Unified, expandable data acquisition architecture supporting cards from Quanser, National Instruments and other manufacturers
  • Single or multiple PC / board configurations supported
  • Support for multiple targets (OS’s and chipsets) from a single Simulink diagram
  • External Hardware-In-the-Loop card interfacing provided in C/C++, MATLAB, and .NET languages

 

Protocol-Independent Communication Framework

  • Full set of data streaming blocks to enable any synchronous or asynchronous communication with processes outside of the running controller
  • Native support of TCP/IP, UDP, serial, shared memory, named pipes, SPI, I2C, Peak CAN, ARCNET and other protocols
  • Extensible framework enabling distributed control, device interfacing, teleoperation and general interprocess communication between controllers and local or remote applications
  • External communication interfacing provided in C/C++, MATLAB, and .NET languages

 

Support of Multi-Threaded, Multi-Rate and Asynchronous Models

  • Multi-processor support for improved sampling rates and performance
  • Control of thread priorities and CPU affinity
  • Run multi-threaded and multi-rate models
  • Support for asynchronous threads in Simulink® models, ideal for asynchronous communications, etc.
  • Run more than one model on a single target or multiple targets at the same time, locally and/or remotely
  • Standalone controller execution
  • Self-booting target for embedded modes

 

Extensive third-party devices support

  • Support for third-party devices ranging from infrared cameras to Denso, Kinova and KUKA robots
  • Support for peripherals such as mouse, keyboard and force feedback joysticks
  • Host speech recognition and synthesis

Product Details

32-bit or 64-bit MATLAB, Simulink, MATLAB Coder,
Simulink Coder, Control System Toolbox (required for labs)
Target Types Host Operating System Compiler Tools 32-bit¹ 64-bit
Windows Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1,
or
Windows 10		 Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 or 2013
Professional Edition with Visual C++		 R2015b R2015b, R2016a, R2016b, R2017a
Microsoft Visual Studio 2015
Professional Edition with Visual C++		 N/A R2016a, R2016b, R2017a
Microsoft Windows SDK 7.1 R2015b R2015b, R2016a, R2016b, R2017a
Linux DuoVero² Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1,
or
Windows 10		 GCC-based cross-compiler supplied R2015b R2015b, R2016a, R2016b, R2017a

¹ 32-bit Windows Host PC support will be deprecated with the release of MATLAB R2017b.
² Linux DuoVero target requires a DuoVero Zephyr board (provided by Quanser) with the Yocto root file system customized for QUARC.

For full details on QUARC 2.6 features, visit the full documentation page and check the release notes.

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