January 15, 2014

DFT on an Arduino

You read that right. DFT, not FFT. Discrete Fourier Transform, DFT.

Why would I do such a thing you ask? Why not just simply use the faster and simpler FFT (Fast Fourier Transform)? It even has Fast as part of its name!





Well, I was still on chapter 11 of this amazing book The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing by, Steven W. Smith as this experiment. FFT was the next chapter. There's an on-line abridged version too: http://www.dspguide.com/

 Why? Letsee... About a month back (2013Dec), Ashok asked me on facebook whether I knew anything about embedded systems and microelectronics. I replied that I did, but I had never actually used one. I told him that there some cool stuff around - Arduino and such, that make prototyping super easy. I then remembered an old memory. I always wanted to learn DSP properly and new exactly what I wanted to do with that knowledge. Back in college I had absolutely wasted away my DSP course by slacking off. Regretful :(