Question

What is the most efficient way to generate a signed float array of arbitrary length containing the amplitude (represented from 1 to -1) of a sine wave in C?

Answer 1

As Carl Smotricz pointed out in his answer, you can easily write a simple C program to build a hard-coded array for you.

The following code would do the trick:

int main(int argc, char * argv[])
{
    const int tableSize = 10;
    const char * fileName = "sin_table.txt";

    int x;
    FILE * file;

    file = fopen(fileName, "w");
    if (file == NULL) { printf("unable to open file\n"); return -1; }

    fprintf(file, "float sin_table[%d] =\n{\n ", tableSize);
    for (x = 0; x < tableSize; x++)
    {
        fprintf(file, "\t%f,\n", sinf(x*2*pi/tableSize));
    }
    fprintf(file, "};\n");

    fclose(file);
    return 0;
}

And the output would look like this:

float sin_table[10] =
{
    0.000000,
    0.587785,
    0.951057,
    0.951056,
    0.587785,
    -0.000000,
    -0.587785,
    -0.951057,
    -0.951056,
    -0.587785,
};