Session 3220 Enhancing the 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. Many textbooks are published containing examples, if not sections, devoted to these textual languages. We have argued, in a previous paper, that whereas this environment may be efficient in manipulating equations, textual implementation of processes best described by block diagrams loses its intuitive substance and gave examples in LabVIEW of implementations that are better left graphical. However, 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. Having decided to teach DSP with LabVIEW a year ago, I have found myself writing many routines to complement the standard DSP toolkit as I have tried to demonstrate basic concepts. This paper will describe this additional toolkit that has been growing to make LabVIEW a better teaching tool in a DSP class