The primary audience for DSP PAW is the engineering classroom, where students taking a course on digital signal processing will be using DSP PAW for laboratory or homework assignments to study algorithm design. As the project has grown over the past few months, I now have a better idea of how practical it is to reach this target of classroom use. There are two main factors to consider: cost of the hardware/software and availability of educational material to build a course off of.

The cost of DSP PAW is intentionally minimal. By being open-source, there is no need to purchase software. By limiting hardware to an Arduino-compatible add-on board, we avoid competition with other development boards used in engineering curriculum. Many microcontroller courses already use STM32-based boards, meaning the NUCLEO board this project uses is either already available to students or could be easily transitioned to by those other courses. The outcome is additional microcontroller experience for students and reduced hardware cost for schools.

With the add-on board design reaching its final stage, we can make a good estimate on this hardware cost for a classroom of around 20 students. I used Digikey's myList to create a bill of materials for 20 add-on boards, adding an extra line for the cost of the PCB and assembly. The grand total came out to $316.37 USD or just $15.82 per board. This should be a minor expense compared to the "course fees" in the hundreds of dollars that undergraduate engineering courses can often come with. Including the cost of a NUCLEO if necessary only adds $14.60 for a total of around $30 per student.

The greater challenge for this project then becomes providing enough educational material to convince professors to adopt this solution. At the moment we offer multiple code examples to show how topics like convolution, FIR and IIR filters, differentiation, and amplitude modification can be implemented. Tools in the GUI can be used to study algorithm optimization at the CPU instruction level. I'm also writing up a guide to walk through using the software with some of these examples that will be made available in the coming days.

Despite all of this content and documentation, the project is still missing a concrete course outline or some complete laboratory assignments that could truly drive a course. This task will most likely need to wait for an enthusiastic professor that is willing to build up their course around DSP PAW -- something I would certainly be glad to help with. Until then, my plan is to make the add-on board available for anyone to purchase and to see where the project can grow from there.