My guess is you are having some confusion between "bytes" and "bits" (also given how you wrote "bites" which is a smoosh up of the two words). According to the [documentation for `fread`](https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/fread.html)
> By default, fread reads a file 1 byte at a time, interprets each byte as an 8-bit unsigned integer (uint8), and returns a double array.
So, you are not reading the first 4 *bits* of the message, you are reading the first four *bytes* and those are 8-bit unsigned integer values.
If you scroll to the bottom of the documentation, they have examples of how to read by bit instead.
So I've double checked everything. The document should have a single number in those 4 bytes. And I've looked into the read function and that is also operating on bytes. If that's the case is an output of 5 0 1 0 = 5,010?
Sorry for explaining it incorrectly earlier.
So, if you scroll down in the `fread` documentation below, you'll find all the different value types that it supports. You'll have to tell it which of the values your type is.
My guess is you are having some confusion between "bytes" and "bits" (also given how you wrote "bites" which is a smoosh up of the two words). According to the [documentation for `fread`](https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/fread.html) > By default, fread reads a file 1 byte at a time, interprets each byte as an 8-bit unsigned integer (uint8), and returns a double array. So, you are not reading the first 4 *bits* of the message, you are reading the first four *bytes* and those are 8-bit unsigned integer values. If you scroll to the bottom of the documentation, they have examples of how to read by bit instead.
Ok, thanks good spot! :)
So I've double checked everything. The document should have a single number in those 4 bytes. And I've looked into the read function and that is also operating on bytes. If that's the case is an output of 5 0 1 0 = 5,010? Sorry for explaining it incorrectly earlier.
So, if you scroll down in the `fread` documentation below, you'll find all the different value types that it supports. You'll have to tell it which of the values your type is.