Work in progress — A hardware platform for a continuous-time signals and systems course

This paper describes a hardware platform that can provide hands-on learning experiences for introductory continuous-time signals and system courses. The signal inputs on the platform consist of a microphone, an instrumentation amplifier input with a right-leg drive for measuring ECGs, and a general voltage input, which enable the students to work with a wide variety of realistic signals. Other analog circuits perform multiplication, addition, filtering, and sampling of those input signals. The underlying hypothesis of this work is that students can improve their understanding of and interest in frequency domain concepts via manipulation of realistic continuous-time systems and observation of signals simultaneously in the time and frequency domains.