MATLAB: Making an animation of a 3d vector through time.

animationvectorvector analysis

I am relatively new to matlab and figuring this out alone is a little above my paygrade.
I put an accelerometer on a weather balloon for a project. The accelerometer gives an X, Y, and Z component of the actual acceleration vector.
 rawdata=xlsread('balloon.xlsx'); %Importing Data
 time=rawdata(:,7);
 Zaccel=rawdata(:,2);
 Yaccel=rawdata(:,4);
 Xaccel=rawdata(:,6);
 resultant=rawdata(:,8); 
 for i=1:length(resultant)  %Correcting for Outliers

    if resultant(i)>5
        resultant(i)=0;
    elseif resultant(i)<1
        resultant(i)=0;
    end
 end
 for j=1:length(Zaccel)    %Correcting for Outliers
    if Zaccel(i)<1
        Zaccel(i)=0
    elseif Zaccel(i)>5
        Zaccel(i)=0
    elseif Yaccel(i)<1
        Yaccel(i)=0
    elseif Yaccel(i)>5
        Yaccel(i)=0
    elseif Xaccel(i)<1
        Xaccel(i)=0
    elseif Xaccel(i)>5
        Xaccel(i)=0
    end
 end
 unitx=[];                 %Creating X-componant of unit vector
 for i=1:length(Xaccel)
    unitx(i)=Xaccel(i)./resultant(i);
 end
 unity=[];                 %Creating Y-componant of unit vector
 for j=1:length(Yaccel)
    unity(j)=Yaccel(j)./resultant(j);
 end
 unitz=[];                 %Creating Z-componant of unit vector
 for k=1:length(Zaccel)
    unitz(k)=Zaccel(k)./resultant(k);
 end
 curve=animatedline('Linewidth',2);
 figure
 for i=1:length(unitx)
    addpoints(curve, unitx(i), unity(i), unitz(i));
    drawnow
 end
I want to make an animation of the direction that this unit vector points through time so that each time step, the plot displays the next vector. So in essence, instead of plotting a bunch of points over time, I want each "point" to be a vector arrow pointing from the origin and I do not want them to stay plotted, I want each to be deleted as the next is plotted. I am not sure how to go about this.
Zaccel, Yaccel, and Xaccel represent the raw data given by the accelerometer. Resultant is the magnitude of the resultant vector.

Best Answer

N = 100 ;
%%coordinate positions
X = rand(N,1) ;
Y = rand(N,1) ;
Z = rand(N,1) ;
%%Velocity components
u = rand(N,1) ;
v = rand(N,1) ;
w = rand(N,1) ;
for i = 1:N
    quiver3(X(i),Y(i),Z(i),u(i),v(i),w(i)) ;
    pause(0.1) ;
end
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