Harmonic Notch Filter

My basement is covered with power lines and florescent lights which makes collecting ECG and EEG data  rather difficult due to the 60 cycle hum.  I found the following notch filter to work very well at eliminating the background signal without effecting the highly amplified signals I was looking for.

The notch filter is based on the a transfer function with the form $$H(z)=\frac{1}{2}(1+A(z))$$ where A(z) is an all pass filter. The original paper [1] describes a method to...

Ancient History

The other day I was downloading an IDE for a new (to me) OS.  When I went to compile some sample code, it failed.  I went onto a forum, where I was told "if you read the release notes you'd know that the peripheral libraries are in a legacy download".  Well damn!  Looking back at my previous versions I realized I must have done that and forgotten about it.  Everything changes, and keeping up with it takes time and effort.

When I first started with microprocessors we...

Dealing With Fixed Point Fractions

Fixed point fractional representation always gives me a headache because I screw it up the first time I try to implement an algorithm. The difference between integer operations and fractional operations is in the overflow.  If the representation fits in the fixed point result, you can not tell the difference between fixed point integer and fixed point fractions.  When integers overflow, they lose data off the most significant bits.  When fractions overflow, they lose data off...

Number Theory for Codes

Everything in the digital world is encoded.  ASCII and Unicode are combinations of bits which have specific meanings to us.  If we try to interpret a compiled program as Unicode, the result is a lot of garbage (and beeps!)  To reduce errors in transmissions over radio links we use Error Correction Codes so that even when bits are lost we can recover the ASCII or Unicode original.  To prevent anyone from understanding a transmission we can encrypt the raw data...

Dealing With Fixed Point Fractions

Fixed point fractional representation always gives me a headache because I screw it up the first time I try to implement an algorithm. The difference between integer operations and fractional operations is in the overflow.  If the representation fits in the fixed point result, you can not tell the difference between fixed point integer and fixed point fractions.  When integers overflow, they lose data off the most significant bits.  When fractions overflow, they lose data off...

Harmonic Notch Filter

My basement is covered with power lines and florescent lights which makes collecting ECG and EEG data  rather difficult due to the 60 cycle hum.  I found the following notch filter to work very well at eliminating the background signal without effecting the highly amplified signals I was looking for.

The notch filter is based on the a transfer function with the form $$H(z)=\frac{1}{2}(1+A(z))$$ where A(z) is an all pass filter. The original paper [1] describes a method to...