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Is it possible to implement realtime DSP algorithms on PC using a NI PC acquisition card like NI PCI-4461?

In A New FXLMS Algorithm with Off-line and On-line Secondary-Path Modeling Scheme for Active Noise Control of Power Transformers, they run a real time ANC algorithm using a PC.

But my thinking is: PC is not real time. Any application running on it will be non-real-time and maybe interrupted by any other apps or windows services. Then how can these guys run real-time ANC on a PC?

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    $\begingroup$ Depends on how do you define "real-time" ... ? $\endgroup$
    – Juha P
    Aug 23, 2022 at 13:23
  • $\begingroup$ @JuhaP Real-time for accoustic active noise cancellation. $\endgroup$
    – mohammadsdtmnd
    Aug 24, 2022 at 5:43
  • $\begingroup$ yes, but how much latency is maximum (in ns,ms)? MayhWorks FileExchange lists couple implementation so, you can try if those works for you se.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange?q=FXLMS $\endgroup$
    – Juha P
    Aug 24, 2022 at 15:34

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There is two parts to "real time"

  1. Continuity: the system can takes in a continuous stream of samples and puts out continuous stream of the same rate. This can go on forever: no samples are lost.
  2. Latency: that's the delay that the processing introduces and the delay between the input and the output streams.

PCs can certainly do continuous real time processing . Typically PCs don't process one sample at a time, but they buffer up a larger number of samples, process them in one go and than output a full buffer again. That's how they get around the "OS is doing a lot of other stuff at the same time" constraint.

However the buffering introduces a lot of latency (100s or 1000s of samples for audio processing). In many cases this is not a problem and in other cases it is.

The article requires a sign-in that I don't have, so I can't read the full thing. I'm guessing that they have a feed-forward real time processing part that is updated in non-real time using some supervisory process. Feed-back cancellation requires extremely low latency and you can't do it on a PC. Note that they also call it "Control" not "Cancellation", so it may be something different than ANC headsets or ear buds.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thx, They're using feedback fxlms and you can use 'sci-hub' to access that paper. $\endgroup$
    – mohammadsdtmnd
    Aug 25, 2022 at 7:12

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