Implement Your DSP Algorithm on Android Tablet: Real-time DSP Laboratory Course

The rapid development of embedded systems brings new opportunities for modernized real-time digital signal processing (DSP) education. This paper introduces a novel real-time DSP laboratory course that aims to give students hands-on experience with real-time embedded systems using Android tablets at an early stage of their careers. The students broaden and deepen their understanding of basic DSP theory and techniques and learn to relate this understanding to real-world observations and applications. The students learn industrially relevant skills such as rapid design prototyping in Python and Android development of DSP applications in C++/Java for computationally constrained mobile devices. The course advances in two phases: structured labs and team projects. In the first half of the course, a series of structured labs are provided to implement and analyze real-time DSP systems that utilize fundamental DSP concepts acquired in the introductory signal processing course. The fundamental concepts include topics such as FIR and IIR filtering, multi-rate processing, sampling, windowing, and spectral analysis. The remaining weeks in the course are about implementing and simulating a DSP algorithm of a student's choice from a set of seminal DSP papers such as adaptive filtering, pitch detection, edge-aware filtering, motion tracking, pattern recognition, etc. The team project revolves around the development, testing, presentation, and documentation to help the students defend their proposed design and receive feedback from the teaching staff. We have offered this course for four years, and the student's feedback in the form of survey questionnaires has confirmed that this course has been successful.