Simple Visualizations for a Statics Problem in MATLAB

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

A colleague was trying to draw some structures and do basic static analysis on them. He wanted to write a routine that would draw a pinned beam given the locations of the two pins. This can be done pretty easily in MATLAB with a patch. This video shows how to do that. It also discusses strategies such as not using 'Magic Numbers' in your code.