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Chapters

This textbook is organized into 27 chapters covering 574 concepts, built from the course's 200 core theory concepts plus 374 concepts drawn directly from the 35 hands-on labs.

Chapter Overview

  1. Hello World: Thonny, MicroPython, and Your First GPIO Program — 22 concepts
  2. Know Your Board: ARM Cortex-M Architecture and the Pico 2 — 24 concepts
  3. Peripherals: The OLED Display, Buttons, and Deploying Standalone Code — 29 concepts
  4. Waves: Amplitude, Frequency, Phase, and Harmonics — 16 concepts
  5. Capturing Real Audio: The I2S Microphone — 13 concepts
  6. Sampling, Quantization, and Aliasing — 30 concepts
  7. Complex Numbers and Wave Superposition — 25 concepts
  8. Correlation: Does My Signal Contain This Note? — 23 concepts
  9. Computing and Validating the DFT — 28 concepts
  10. Why the DFT Is Too Slow — 7 concepts
  11. From DFT to FFT: Divide and Conquer, Twiddle Factors, and the Butterfly — 24 concepts
  12. Building the FFT: A Complete Recursive Implementation — 35 concepts
  13. FFT Variants, Complexity, and Correctness — 11 concepts
  14. Computing and Displaying a Real Spectrum — 22 concepts
  15. Windowing, Spectral Leakage, and Peak Detection — 32 concepts
  16. Building a Real-Time Spectrum Analyzer — 17 concepts
  17. Measuring Time: The DWT Cycle Counter — 18 concepts
  18. Benchmarking Methodology: Warm-Up, Statistics, and Fair Comparison — 19 concepts
  19. The Abstraction Ladder: Python, C, and Assembly Compared — 30 concepts
  20. Does Your CPU Have an FPU? — 16 concepts
  21. Your First Assembly Function: Registers and Loops — 18 concepts
  22. Talking to the FPU: Floating-Point Assembly — 20 concepts
  23. The Butterfly in Assembly: A Complete FFT and Production Libraries — 23 concepts
  24. Specialization and Branchless Code — 17 concepts
  25. Beyond the Assembler: Hand-Encoding and Instruction Formats — 23 concepts
  26. Competing Variants: Predict, Measure, Explain — 12 concepts
  27. Capstone: Applications, Design, and Reporting — 20 concepts

How to Use This Textbook

Chapters are ordered so that every concept appears after all of its prerequisites — you can read straight through, or jump to a chapter and follow its Prerequisites links backward to fill in anything you're missing. The chapters track the course's 35 hands-on labs closely but are organized by concept dependency rather than lab number, so a small number of chapters (for example, wave math before digital-audio capture) appear in a different order than the labs they support — the concrete lab experience and the formal chapter explanation are allowed to diverge slightly.

Note: Each chapter lists the concepts it covers, drawn directly from the course's learning graph.