Would Arduino be a suitable platform for learning Digital Signal Procession?

Community General Discussion
1

I have studied DSP theory but wish to now experiment with my knowledge. E.G. To input a short sound excerpt and examine the effects of various types of filters and algorithms. Would Arduino be suitable for these sorts of experiments, and if so, which version would you recommend?
Thanks
Stan

2

AFAIK, none of the existing Arduinos have DSP instructions.
Look at the Teensy 3.1 if you want to play with audio DSP.
https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/

Pete

3

Memory to hold the sound would also need some help.
Maybe the Due/Yun have enough to some simple processing.

4

E.G. To input a short sound excerpt and examine the effects of various types of filters and algorithms.

Without adding extra hardware the Due is the only platform that would be able to do this.

But as stated before the architecture of these sorts of processors are not well suited to digital filter implementation, especially if you want to do the filtering in real time.
Even with a Due you only have 80K of memory to play with so at 40K sampling rate you are not going to get better than 2 seconds of data, or one second if you are doing non real time processing on a sample.

Have you seen this:-
http://interface.khm.de/index.php/labor/experimente/arduino-realtime-audio-processing/

5

Thanks guys, for your responses. Looks like I'll have to think this over carefully. I'm thinking of starting by setting up a simple experiment to illustrate aliasing, which should be easy - feed a short analog sine wave into a ADC and view the result at various sampling rates. I thought I could do this simply by programs such as Audacity or Sigview, which I have - but it ain't that easy. Do you think Arduino would be able to do this? I would have to build a simple LC analog generator to generate the signal, and then - maybe use the Due version as you suggest. Any further advice?
Stan

6

If you have not got a signal source then you can calculate the samples into SRAM in the setup function and then use them.

Why is it tricky using Audacity?

You need both a signal generator and a scope to do proper DSP invistagation like this.