how do you recommend getting into this sort of stuff? i have some basic experience with microcontrollers and i'm interested in some dsp hardware projects but i'm not sure where to start as the classes offered do not touch hardware..
the only real way is to get hardware. If you have some experience already, you shouldn't need a course: I can't find the current prices immdeiately, but a couple of years ago something like 250$ got you a fully functional development board (including some analog I/O) + corresponding IDE + signal processing example code of a true DSP like the TI C6000 series. Example of a current version would be http://www.ti.com/tool/tmdxevm6670