Create an animated free body diagram?

Is it possible to animate a free body diagram with a force changing over time? I already calculated an array with all the force values, but have no way of animating it in a good way besides plotting it like any other graph.

[Image Analyst]

Yes, but what's wrong with doing a line plot with plot()? What are you looking for?

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[Brandon Holladay]

I specifically want to show the change of force as an animation rather than a static plot. I have tried the "for" control to plot frames of the graph, but that updates the figure to a completely new plot with a new ylim and xlim.

[Sindar]

set the xlim before the loop

Answer 1

[Srivardhan Gadila]

You can refer to the documentation of plot, pause, Specify Axis Limits, hold & figure.

The following is the example code based on the above functions:

1. If you want the point moving i.e., new point to appear and previous point to disappear:

figure
for i = 1:10
    plot(i,abs(sqrt(100-i^2)),'o');
    xlim([0 10])
    ylim([0 10])
%     hold on
    pause(1)
end 
% hold off

2. If you want all the previous points to appear in the plot as well:

figure
for i = 1:10
    plot(i,abs(sqrt(100-i^2)),'o');
    xlim([0 10])
    ylim([0 10])
    hold on
    pause(1)
end 
hold off