Preface
Dear Students,
This lab guide or book is
designed to be used with the famous book titled “Signals and Systems” by
Oppenheim and Willsky, which is used by many electrical engineering departments
in teaching of a course with the same name. A good understanding of concepts and
ideas introduced in this basic course of electrical engineering establishes a
firm background for further studies in telecommunications and many other fields
that heavily use signal processing.
Textbooks offer lots of
carefully constructed exercises and questions, but I observed that simple
computer projects demonstrating concepts introduced in classes, increased
motivation of students and enhanced their understanding. This observation
stimulated me to develop this book. Also, expect a few including “signals and
systems”, every basic course of electrical engineering has some lab designed to
run with it. This book will fill that gap for “signals and systems.”
For almost every basic
subject discussed in your textbook, you will find a corresponding sample project
in this guide that you can follow step by step. Among others, one difference and
advantage of this new lab approach is that, you will run the lab yourself. As
long as you have a computer with Matlab installed on it and have some free time,
you can do your lab: Just read concise explanations introducing subjects and
follow the steps given in this book. I have chosen MatlabTM Software
(The MathWorks, Inc., Natick, MA) as the environment to set up the
demonstrations or projects in this book, because of its wide accessibility (it
has an affordable yet powerful student version), friendly (easy to learn and
use) interface and powerful graphics capabilities. Not because I am more
experienced in using it than any other software tool.
J
I also attempted to make this
book self-contained so that for each subject or concept demonstrated, you can
also get a glimpse of the theory behind it. However, whenever you feel that you
need more background, please refer to your textbook and/or other references.
This book starts with a short
Matlab tutorial to help you get started, if you are not familiar with Matlab
already. Matlab is an open-environment where MathWorks, maker of Matlab, itself
and users all over the world do contribute and improve Matlab’s services every
day. Studying Matlab will open a whole new world, world of Matlab with its
hundreds of toolboxes and user contributed files that will bring science and
technology to your desktop. As with almost all tools, the best way to learn
Matlab is to learn through practice.
After Matlab tutorial,
projects will come/flow in an order that closely follows the presentation of
topics in your book by Oppenheim and Willsky.
In this first edition of the
book, we have just included 30 projects, covering some basic concepts from the
first 4 chapters of your textbook, with a strong emphasis on Fourier Series
representation of periodic signals. (In coming editions we are planing to
include many more projects.) Nevertheless, the techniques that we introduced in
these projects will show you the way to think about and construct your own
projects or demonstrations.
I hope that using this book
along with your textbook will enhance your understanding of subjects and
concepts discussed in your “signals and systems” classes, as you will have
plenty of hands on experience. I also hope that studying “signal and systems”
with this book will be more fun.
There is a point that will be
clear when you start studying the projects presented in this book but we would
like to still mention it here: Whenever we are dealing with a continuous time
signal or case, we will use a fine time axis and use “plot” command of Matlab to
visualize our signals. For a project or work in discrete time, we will use
“stem” command of Matlab over proper indices to do the visualization.
As for the few conventions
that we adhered in this book, for Matlab command lines we used the
courier new
font and numbered them as
MCL xx
so that we can refer them –to explain what they do– in the text.
We will appreciate your
feedback, suggestions and comments, as we will be continuously developing this
guide/book. You can reach me via e-mail at
asyali@bornova.ege.edu.tr or
asyali@ieee.org .
Best wishes,
Musa Hakan Asyalı, Ph.D.
September 14, 2000
Bornova, İzmir
