What is the best board for a DSP class

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I am taking a graduate EE class in Digital Signal Processing and the instructor is trying to find a cheap easy to implement microcontroller that is designed to implement DSP code. Preferably with sample code. Is there an Arduino board that is meant for DSP? If not what would be the best Arduino option.

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It really depends on what type of DSP (digital signal processing) you want to do. DSP systems often times have specialized instructions to speed up common tasks in processing, such as high speed multiplies, and instructions that process multiple 8/16-bit ints in parallel.

Is having these instructions critical? Perhaps not unless not having the instructions would slow down the processing too much for the circuit.

I don't believe the AVR processors used in most official Arduinos (except the Due) have DSP instruction support. The Due uses an Arm Cortex M3 which also does not have DSP support.

The Teensy 3.0 and 3.1 micro-processors uses Freescale ARM Cortex M4 processors that have single cycle multiply and some DSP instructions. You can buy the Teensy 3.1 for $19.80 at pjrc.com (PJRC Store) and the older Teensy 3.0 for $19.00 (PJRC Store). Add $3 if you want them to solder in the pins for breadboard usage. Adafruit sells the 3.0/3.1 without an option for soldering the pins and Sparkfun sells the 3.1.

While Teensy is not designed by the Arduino team, it does use the Arduino IDE and libraries. If you dislike the Arduino IDE, there are examples where you can use the Teensy with raw Makefiles or using the Eclipse IDE. You will need to use the Teensy downloader to load code. The software includes an Arm math library but I don't recall much about it.

If your DSP involves floating point, the Teensy 3.0/3.1 do not use the variant of Cortex M4 processors that has floating point, so it is simulated (just like it is on the AVR processors). Most DSP tends to be integer only calculations.

If you are doing audio processing, PJRC just released an audio shield for the Teensy 3.0/3.1 and a beta of the audio library is now available.

You will need to install Arduino 1.0.5, and then install the PJRC additions to the Arduino software to support the Teensy processors: Teensyduino: Download and Install Teensy support into the Arduino IDE. There is a rather active forum discussing the Teensy products at: PJRC (Teensy) Forum.