Using a digital signal processor for real time implementation of a tuning device

In this paper, a demonstration of the use of a digital signal processing (DSP) board for teaching purposes and project implementation is presented. This is carried out through the design of a guitar tuner using a DSP platform. The goal of the design is to optimize the DSP process so that the best results are obtained for the guitar tuner. This involves the proper selection of DSP parameters and the use of DSP techniques to provide an accurate guitar tuning such as frequency resolution and sampling rates. The application was implemented in a target hardware system, the TMS320C5402 DSP Starter Kit (DSK). The software for the guitar tuner is written in the C programming language and makes use of DSP assembly functions provided by Texas Instruments. The software program developed for the guitar tuner can be run in the Code Composer Studio (CCS), Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and is able to accurately tune a guitar in several common tunings. This project is interesting for the students so they can experience real time implementation issues of different DSP techniques.