Missing hardware toolstrip in custom target simulink models

At our university we are developping our own targets for simulink code generation because of hard realtime and other requirements.

So far we have been able to do this without problems. At the moment we are upgrading to MATLAB R2020b and are porting our targets as well.

This seems to go well but one thing seems to be missing, the 'Hardware' toolstrip in simulink when building a model for 'External mode'.

When building a test model for grt target (on which our targets are based), as soon as I select 'External mode' in 'Code Generation / Interface' and press apply, the 'Hardware' tab in the simulink toolstrip appears from which I can control external mode operation.

When selecting our custom model and also selecting 'External mode', no such tab appears?

The code for external mode seems to be built, and also starting the resulting application with '-w' flag makes the application wait for a simulink connection. But without the Hardware toolstrip I can't do such thing.

What is the mechanism behind showing this toolstrip tab or not? I see in the configuration parameters that 'Show Custom Hardware App in Simulink Toolstrip' is checked for the grt model but is not for our custom target model. But this checkbox is read only so I can't enable this from here?

Edit:

We are on Linux OS and are simply generating code for x86-64 hardware.

Any advice would be welcome!

Answer 1

[MCFurry]

So I've had contact with Mathworks support and the issue is fixed!

The problem was that we installed our targets by moving them to the matlabroot/rtw/c folder. But this not allowed/supported:

"In R2020a, we introduced the new Simulink Toolstrip. And it was decided that when launching the "Run on custom hardware" app, it checks the location of the .tlc file specified in the model configuration. If the .tlc file is under matlabroot, then only certain MathWorks provided targets are supported, but not custom targets."

So the trivial fix is to put custom targets in another folder but NOT under matlabroot. Then make sure this path is added to matlabpath and save the matlabpath.

Now, when opening a model with your custom target, the hardware toolstrip immediately pops up and you're able to use external mode!