I am trying to understand how FFT works in order to measure the vibrations of a 3D printer. I will be doing this with an Arduino Nano and a MPU6050 accelerometer.
In order to program the Arduino correctly I need to understand some things about FFT first. So various sources state that FFT works with 2^n samples, for example "The FFT-algorithm works with a finite number of samples. This number needs to be 2^n where n is an integer (resulting in 32, 64, 128, etc)". What does this actually mean? From my understanding, if I will be measuring accelerations at a constant sample rate of 600Hz for 10 seconds, I will end up with 6000 samples. Does this mean that I will have to remove some of the measured data in order to end up with 4096 samples, which meets the 2^n samples condition? Or fill up my samples with zeroes to end up with 8196 samples, which also meets the stated condition?
Thank you!