Matlab Tic and toc print something every .5 seconds?

Use a while loop to do the following for a total of 5 seconds. Every half second print, using 
fprintf, the message “The elapsed time is:” followed by the time

This is all I've come up with after looking at it for over an hr..

clear, clc

close all

tic

timerVal = tic;

value = toc(timerVal);

while value <= 5

I cant seem to figure this out... i can easily get it to print the elasped time up to 5 seconds but i have no idea how to make it print every .5 seconds... Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

[Ryan]

tic
while toc<=10
      pause(0.5)
      fprintf('elapsed time is: %.2f seconds. \n',toc')
end

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

start a timer. Loop. Grab the elapsed time for the timer. continue in the loop if the elapsed time is less than 1/2 second. After the loop, stop the timer if need be.

[Andrew]

So if I wanted to go all the way to 5 seconds I would essentially make 10 loops for each .5 seconds and display the time right after ea loop?

[Walter Roberson]

do the body of this loop until 5 seconds have elapsed
  do the body of this loop until 1/2 second has elapsed
    pause, or do some busy work to waste time
  end of inner loop
  my gosh, we're half a second later than we were before. Oh what shall we do?
end of outer loop

Answer 3

[Image Analyst]

How about if you do a for loop where there is a pause(0.5) and a fprintf() inside the loop?

tic
for k = 1 : 10
  pause(0.5);
  fprintf('Elapsed time = %.2f seconds.\n', toc);
end

[Andrew]

Is there a way to not use a pause function, like will I have to make multiple loops if I don't pause?

[Image Analyst]

What's wrong with pause() - it seems to fit your homework question guidelines and doesn't seem to be excluded. Otherwise you can use a timer but it's trickier and more difficult. I'll give you one hint. Here's some code to stop all timers.

  % Delete all timers from memory.
  listOfTimers = timerfindall
  if ~isempty(listOfTimers)
    delete(listOfTimers(:));
  end

You need to do something, so I'll let you figure out how to start the timer. The advantage of a timer is that you can do something in between timer events - you're not hung up like you are with pause().