Drive thorlabs Motorized Microscope Focus Controller with matlab

Hi All

I am working on control Thorlabs focus drive MFC1 with Matlab. Thorlabs only offers its command function in header file ( ZStepper_SDK.h) in C++ and library ( ThorZStepper.dll; ThorZStepper.lib). They don't provide the source code. I am thinking about loading the library in Matlab with function "loadlibrary". It works for examples in mathworks. However, when I tried it with Thorlabs file

    loadlibrary('ThorZStepper.dll','ZStepper_SDK.h')

, error came out:

Does anyone know how to fix the problem or any other way to control the focus drive with Matlab. I appreciate it a lot.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

In C, & is the unary operator used to take the address of something, or is the bitwise "and" operator. Either way, it is an operator, and cannot appear in a type declaration -- only in an executable expression (such as to initialize a variable.)

In C++, & can also be used in type declarations https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/declarations to indicate lvalues . This is the first time I have seen that described so I do not presently understand quite what the difference is compared to some of the other forms.

The code you are compiling uses & in type declarations. That means that the code is illegal as standard C -- although possibly valid under some extension.

MATLAB's loadlibrary() can only work with C language .h files, not with C++ header files. (The .h file could potentially be dual-purpose, as long as it protected the C++ specific portions with a #if or #ifdef )

Starting in R2018a, a new C++ MEX API was added to make it easier to call MATLAB from within C++. However, that interface does not provide any added support for calling third-party C++ from within MATLAB.