Calculate the Frequency of a Sine Wave

Using the DFT to get frequencies

To get the frequency of a sine wave, we need to get the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). We don’t need to understand how to derive the DFT, we just need to know how to use it.

In its simplest terms, the DFT takes a signal and calculates which frequencies are present in it. In more technical terms, the DFT converts a time-domain signal to a frequency domain.

What does that mean? Let’s look at our sine wave from the previous lesson.