(Originally posted on Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials blog.)

Sometimes you want something to update in MATLAB on a regular schedule. Timer objects can do that for you. We first introduced this for test and measurement applications, but it has since been moved into base MATLAB. In this simple example, we will create a timer object and have it fire a callback every second to output a random number to the command line. There are a lot more useful things to do with timer objects, of course.