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https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2182045-why-can-t-i-renew-or-purchase-add-ons-for-m…
"As of January 1, 2026, Perpetual Student and Home offerings have been sunset and replaced with new Annual Subscription Student and Home offerings."
So, Perpetual licenses for Student and Home versions are no more. Also, the ability for Student and Home to license just MATLAB by itself has been removed.
The new offering for Students is $US119 per year with no possibility of renewing through a Software Maintenance Service type offering. That $US119 covers the Student Suite of MATLAB and Simulink and 11 other toolboxes. Before, the perpetual license was $US99... and was a perpetual license, so if (for example) you bought it in second year you could use it in third and fourth year for no additional cost. $US99 once, or $US99 + $US35*2 = $US169 (if you took SMS for 2 years) has now been replaced by $US119 * 3 = $US357 (assuming 3 years use.)
The new offering for Home is $US165 per year for the Suite (MATLAB + 12 common toolboxes.) This is a less expensive than the previous $US150 + $US49 per toolbox if you had a use for those toolboxes . Except the previous price was a perpetual license. It seems to me to be more likely that Home users would have a use for the license for extended periods, compared to the Student license (Student licenses were perpetual licenses but were only valid while you were enrolled in degree granting instituations.)
Unfortunately, I do not presently recall the (former) price for SMS for the Home license. It might be the case that by the time you added up SMS for base MATLAB and the 12 toolboxes, that you were pretty much approaching $US165 per year anyhow... if you needed those toolboxes and were willing to pay for SMS.
But any way you look at it, the price for the Student version has effectively gone way up. I think this is a bad move, that will discourage students from purchasing MATLAB in any given year, unless they need it for courses. No (well, not much) more students buying MATLAB with the intent to explore it, knowing that it would still be available to them when it came time for their courses.
Some years ago I installed a IOBridge IO-204 device from https://iobridge.com/
This was used to remotely control and monitor heating of a building trough the "ioApp" or trough the widgets on their webpage.
Seems like the support for the app and the IObridge webpage (including widgets) is discontinued and the webpage now links to ThingSpeak without any further information.
I cannot find any information about using ThingSpeak to communicate and control an ioBridge IO-204 device?
If it is possible I would really appreciate some help getting starter to do the setup.
Thanks in advance.
This just came out. @Michelle Hirsch spoke to Jousef Murad and answer his questions about the big change in the desktop in R2025a and explained what was going on behind the scene. Enjoy!
The Big MATLAB Update: Dark Mode, Cloud & the Future of Engineering - Michelle Hirsch
Wouldn’t it be great if your laptop AI app could convert itself into an agent for everything? I mean for your laptop and for the entire web? Done.
Setup
My setup is a MacBook with MATLAB and various MCP servers. I have several equivalent Desktop AI apps configured. I will focus on the use of Claude App but fully expect Perplexity App to behave similarly. See How to set up and use AI Desktop Apps with MATLAB and MCP servers.
Warning: My setup grants Claude access to various macOS system services and may have unforeseen consequences. Try this entirely at your own risk, and carefully until comfortable.
My MacOS permissions include
Settings=>Privacy & Security=> Accessibility
where matlab-mcp-core-server and MATLAB enabled, and in
Settings=>Privacy & Security=> Automation,
matlab-mcp-core-server has been enabled to access on a case-by-case basis the applications Comet, Messages, Safari, Terminal, Keynote, Mail, System Events, Google Chrome, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Word. These include just a few of my 85 MacOS applications available, those presently demonstrated to be operable by Claude. Contacts remain disabled for privacy, so I am AI texting carefully.
MCP services are the following:
Server
Command
Associated Tools/Commands
ollama
npx ollama-mcp
ollama_chat, ollama_generate, ollama_list, ollama_show, ollama_pull, ollama_push, ollama_create, ollama_copy, ollama_delete, ollama_embed, ollama_ps, ollama_web_search, ollama_web_fetch
filesystem
npx @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem
read_file, read_text_file, read_media_file, read_multiple_files, write_file, edit_file, create_directory, list_directory, list_directory_with_sizes, directory_tree, move_file, search_files, get_file_info, list_allowed_directories
matlab
matlab-mcp-core-server
evaluate_matlab_code, run_matlab_file, run_matlab_test_file, check_matlab_code, detect_matlab_toolboxes
fetch
npx mcp-fetch-server
fetch_html, fetch_markdown, fetch_txt, fetch_json
puppeteer
npx @modelcontextprotocol/server-puppeteer
puppeteer_navigate, puppeteer_screenshot, puppeteer_click, puppeteer_fill, puppeteer_select, puppeteer_hover, puppeteer_evaluate
shell
uvx mcp-shell-server
Allowed commands: osascript, open, sleep, ls, cat, pwd, echo, screencapture, cp, mv, mkdir, touch, file, find, grep, head, tail, wc, date, which, convert, sips, zip, unzip, pbcopy, pbpaste, ps, curl, mdfind, say
Here, mcp-shell-server has been authorized for a fairly safe set of commands, while Claude inherits from MATLAB additional powers, including MacOS shortcuts. Ollama-mcp is an interface to local Ollama LLMs, filesystem reads and writes files in a limited folder Documents/MATLAB, MATLAB executes MATLAB helper codes and runs scripts, fetch fetches web pages as markdown text, puppeteer enables browser automation in a headless Chrome, and shell runs allowed shell commands, especially osascript (AppleScript to control apps).
Operation of local apps
Once rolling, the first thing you want to do is to text someone what you’ve done! A prompt to your Claude app and some fiddling demonstrates this.
Now you can use Claude to create a Keynote, Excel presentation, or Word document locally. You no longer need to access Office 365 online using a late-2025 AI-assistant-enabled slower browser like Claude Chrome Extension or Perplexity Comet, and I like Keynote better.
Let’s edit a Keynote:
Next ,you might want to operate a cloud AI model using any local browser - Safari, Chrome, or Firefox or some other favorite.
Next, let’s have a conversation with another AI using its desktop application. Hey, sometimes an AI gets a little closed-minded and need a push.
How about we ask some other agent to book us a yoga class? Delegate to Comet or Claude Chrome Extenson to do this.
How does this work?
The key to agentic AI is feedback to enable autonomous operation. This feedback can be text, information about an application state or holistic - images of the application or webpage that a human would see. Your desktop app can screensnap the application and transmit that image to the host AI (hosted by Anthropic for Claude), but faces an API bottleneck. Matlab or an OS-dependent data compression application is an important element. Your AI can help you design pathways and even write code to assist. With MATLAB in the loop, for example, image compression is a function call or two, so with common access to a part of your filesystem, your AI can create and remember a process to get ‘er done efficiently. There are multiple solutions. For my operation, Claude performed timing tests on three such paths and selected the optimal one - MATLAB.
Can one literally talk and listen, not type and read?
Yes. Various ways. On MacOS, one can simply enable dictation and use hot-keys for voice-to-text input. One can also enable audio and have the response read back to you.
How can I do this?
My advice is to build it your way bottom-up with Claude help, and the try-it. There are many details and optimizations in my setup defining how Claude responds to various instructions and confronts circumstances like the user switching or changing the size of windows while operations are on-going, some of which I expect to document along with example helper codes on File Exchange shortly but these are OS-dependent and which will evolve.
Is it possible to display a variable value within the ThingSpeak plot area?
I was wondering yesterday if an AI could help me conquer something I had considered to difficult to bother with, namely creating a mobile-phone app. I had once ages ago played with Xcode on my laptop, leanrng not only would I have to struggle with the UI but learn Swift to boot, plus Xcode, so...neah. Best left to specialists.
This article describes an experiment in AI creation of an HTML5 prototype and then a mobile-phone app, based on an educational MATLAB Live Script. The example target script is Two-dimensional Newton Cradles, a fun Live Script for physics students by the author. (You can check out my other scripts at File Exchange here.) The target script involves some nontrivial collisional dynamics but uses no specialized functions. The objective was to create a mobile phone app that allows the user to exercise interactive controls similar to the slider controls in the Live Script but in an interactive mobile-phone-deployed simulation. How did this experiment go? A personal best!!
Using the AI setup described in A universal agentic AI for your laptop and beyond, Claude AI was directed to first study the Live Script and then to invent an HTML5 prototype as described in Double Pendulum Chaos Explorer: From HTML5 Prototype to MATLAB interactive application with AI. (All in one prompt.) Claude was then directed to convert the HTML5 to Swift in a project structure and to operate Xcode to generate an iOS app. The use of Claude (Anthropic) and iOS (APPLE) does not constitute endorsement of these products. Similar results are possible with other AIs and operating systems.
Here is the HTML5 version in a browser:
The HTML5 creation was the most lengthy part of the process. (Actually, documenting this is the most lengthy part!) The AI made an initial guess as to what interactive controls to support. I had to test the HTML5 product and say a few things like "You know, I want to include controls for the number of pendulums and for the pendulum lattice shape and size too, OK?"
When the HTML5 seemed good, I asked for suggestions for how best to fit that to a tiny mobile phone display screen and make some selections of options provided. I was sweating at that point, thinking "This is not going to go well..." Actually, I had already done a quick experiment to build a very simple app to put Particle Data Group information into an app and that went swimmingly well. The PDG had already tried submitting such an app to APPLE and been dismissed as trying to publish a book so I wasn't going to pursue it. But THAT app just had to display some data, not calculate anything.
It did go well. There was one readily fixed error in the build, then voila. I added some tweaks including an information page. Here is the iPhone app in the simulator.
The File Exchange package Live Script to Mobile-Phone App Conversion with AI contains: 1) the HTML5 prototype which may be compared to the original Live Script, 2) a livescript-2-ios-skill that may be imported into any AI to assist in replicating the process, and 3) related media files. Have fun out there! Bear with me as I sort out what zip uploads are permitted there. It seems a zip folder structure is not!
I see many people are using our new MCP Core Sever to do amazing things with MATLAB and AI. Some people are describing their experiements here (e.g. @Duncan Carlsmith) and on LinkedIn (E.g. Sergiu-Dan Stan and Toshi Takeuchi) and we are getting lots of great feedback.Some of that feedback has been addressed in the latest release so please update your install now.
MATLAB MCP Core Server v0.4.0 has been released on public GitHub:
Release highlights:
- Added Plain Text Live Code Guidelines MCP resource
- Added MCP Annotations to all tools
We encourage you to try this repository and provide feedback. If you encounter a technical issue or have an enhancement request, create an issue https://github.com/matlab/matlab-mcp-core-server/issues
Sometimes you might be secretly using your phone under the table, or stuck in traffic in an Uber, and want to ask a AI to ask an AI to ask an AI to do something useful. If that's you (and for your sake I hope not but... ), you could try the hack illustrated here.
This article illustrates experiments with APPLE products and uses Claude (Anthropic.com) but is not an endorsement of any AI or mobile phone or computer system vendor. Similar things could be done by hooking together other products and services. My setup is described in A universal agentic AI for your laptop and beyond. Please be aware of the security risks in granting any AI access to your systems.
I have now used Screens 5 and tailscale to mirror my laptop via a VNC to my old iPhone 13 Pro. That's the trick. With appropriate settings Screens, allows one to pan and zoom in order to operate the otherwise-too-tiny laptop controls. An AI can help you install and configure thtese products.
The image below is an iPhone screensnap of the Screens iPhone App showing my laptop browser while editing this article. I could be writing this article on my phone manually. I could be operating an AI to write this article. But just FYI, I'm not. :)
Below is a screensnap of APPLE KeyNote. On the slide is a screenshot of iPhone Screen-view of the laptop itself. Via Screens on iPhone, I had asked Claude App on my laptop to open a Keynote presentation on my laptop concerning AI. The Keynote slide is about using iPhone to ask Claude App to operate an AI at Huggface. Or something like that - I'm totally lost. Aren't you?
Of course, you can operate Claude App or Perplexity App on iPhone but, as of this writing, Claude Chrome Extension and Perplexity Comet are not yet available for iPhone, limiting agentic use to your laptop. And these systems can not access your native laptop applications and your native AI models so I think Screens or an equivalent may be the only way at present to bring all this functionality to your phone.
Sweet, but can I operate my iPhone agentically? Um,..., actually yes. The trick is to turn on iPhone mirroring so the iPhone appears on your laptop with all of the iPhone buttons clickable using the laptop touch pad. And a local AI is pretty good at clicking using clicclic and other tricks. It can be a little painful the first time to discover how to perform such operations and the tricks are best remembered as AI skills.
Below is a screensnap of my laptop showing the mirrored iPhone on the left. On the right is my Claude Desktop App. I asked Claude to launch Voice Memos and Claude developed a method to do this. We are ready to play a recording stored there (it will be heard through my laptop speaker) or edit it or email it to someone, or whatever. If you thought to initiate a surreptious audio recording or camera image, be aware that APPLE has disabled those functionalities.
Of course, I can ask Claude (or another AI) to launch other iPhone apps, even Screens app as you can see below. This is a screensnap of my laptop with iPhone mirroring and with iPhone Screens App launched on the phone showing the laptop screen as I write this article, or something like that. ;)
Next, let me use Claude desktop app with iPhone mirroring to switch to iPhone Claude App or iPhone Perplexity App and... Nevermind. I think the point has been made well enough. The larger lesson perhaps is to consider how agentic AIs can thusly and otherwise operate one's personal the internet of things, say check if my garage door is closed etc. Have fun. Be safe.
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