MATLAB Arduino Tutorial 1 - Serial Connection between Arduino to MATLAB to USB

The Matlab Arduino team created awesome tutorial on how to connect matlab with arduino through serial port. They provide these tutorials as a guidance for those who want to do similar things. Source code is not provided. I think it would be helpful to publish the code for those who want to try. I will also comment about some pitfall that I went through when I follow these videos.

My arduino code:

The original video doesn't show the arduino code in the loop portion. I put a digitalWrite for pin 13 as a confirmation for the successful connection, ie pin 13 will lit up after a serial connection is set up successfully between arduino and Matlab:

void setup() {
  // initialize serial communication at 9600 bits per second:
  Serial.begin(9600);
  pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
  Serial.println('a');
  char a = 'b';
  while (a != 'a')
  {
    a = Serial.read();
 
  }

}
// the loop routine runs over and over again forever:
void loop() {
  digitalWrite(13,HIGH);
}

Matlab code

I use the same code as the video. IMPORTANT: you must save this code as a setupSerial.m file in the same folder before executing the function:

function[s,flag] = setupSerial(comPort)
flag = 1;
s = serial(comPort);
set(s,'DataBits',8);
set(s,'StopBits',1);
set(s,'BaudRate', 9600);
set(s,'Parity', 'none');
fopen(s);
a = 'b';
while (a~='a')
        a = fread(s,1,'uchar');
end
if (a=='a')
    disp('serial read');
end
fprintf(s,'%c','a');
mbox = msgbox('Serial Comm setup.'); uiwait(mbox);
fscanf(s,'%u');
end