Putting Bells & Whistles on DSP Toolkit of LabVIEW

Most Digital Signal Processing (DSP) courses rely heavily on MATLAB and/or C, representing the state of the art in textual programming, for their standard computer tools. We have argued, in previous papers, that whereas this environment may be efficient in manipulating equations, textual implementation of processes best described by block diagrams loses its intuitive substance and have provided examples of LabVIEW implementations that are better left graphical. The standard DSP toolkit of LabVIEW is aimed at the practicing engineer/scientist who needs to process acquired data to reach other ends in contrast to a student whose aim is to learn about signal processing. LabVIEW’s DSP toolkit is rich with high level algorithms but needs to be enhanced in order to serve the pedagogical needs of students of DSP. While teaching this course at a previous institution, we developed many routines to complement the standard DSP toolkit as we tried to demonstrate basic concepts. Returning to teaching DSP at a different institution after a break of 6 years, some of those old tools needed to be revised and new possibilities that LabVIEW has to offer in this field were discovered. This paper will review our past experience and will focus on this additional toolkit that was developed to make LabVIEW a better teaching tool in a DSP class. In particular, detailed descriptions of classroom activity that takes advantage of LabVIEW’s sound capture and playback routines will be provided. The paper will conclude with the results of a focus group discussion with the students of the DSP class.