Digital Filter Instructions from IKEA?
Swedish “Bygglek” = build and play. Swedish “Bygglek” = build and play.
Swedish “Bygglek” = build and play. Swedish “Bygglek” = build and play.
Swedish “Bygglek” = build and play. Swedish “Bygglek” = build and play.
Swedish “Bygglek” = build and play. Swedish “Bygglek” = build and play.
Swedish “Bygglek” = build and play. Swedish “Bygglek” = build and...
Simulink-Simulation of SSB demodulation
≥≥≥ Simulink-Simulation of SSB demodulation or modulation from the article “Understanding the ‘Phasing Method’ of Single Sideband Demodulation” by Richard Lyons Josef Hoffmann
The article “Understanding the ‘Phasing Method’ of Single Sideband Demodulation” by Richard Lyons is a very good description of this topic. The block representation from the figures are clear and easy to understand. They are predestined for a simulation in Simulink. The simulation can help...
Setting Carrier to Noise Ratio in Simulations
When simulating digital receivers, we often want to check performance with added Gaussian noise. In this article, I’ll derive the simple equations for the rms noise level needed to produce a desired carrier to noise ratio (CNR or C/N). I also provide a short Matlab function to generate a noise vector of the desired level for a given signal vector.
Definition of C/NThe Carrier to noise ratio is defined as the ratio of average signal power to noise power for a modulated...
An Efficient Full-Band Sliding DFT Spectrum Analyzer
In this blog I present two computationally efficient full-band discrete Fourier transform (DFT) networks that compute the 0th bin and all the positive-frequency bin outputs for an N-point DFT in real-time on a sample-by-sample basis.
An Even-N Spectrum Analyzer
The full-band sliding DFT (SDFT) spectrum analyzer network, where the DFT size N is an even integer, is shown in Figure 1(a). The x[n] input sequence is restricted to be real-only valued samples. Notice that the only real parts of...
Update to a Narrow Bandpass Filter in Octave or Matlab
Following my earlier blog post (June 2020) featuring a Narrow Bandpass Filter, I’ve had some useful feedback and suggestions. This has inspired me to come up with an updated version, incorporating the following changes compared to the earlier one :
- Simpler code in Octave or Matlab
- Float32 precision replaces float64
- Faster processing by a factor of at least 4 times
- Easier setup of input parameters
- Normalized signal output level
A new experimental version in...
Add a Power Marker to a Power Spectral Density (PSD) Plot
Perhaps we should call most Power Spectral Density (PSD) calculations relative PSD, because usually we don’t have to worry about absolute power levels. However, for cases (e.g., measurements or simulations) where we are concerned with absolute power, it would be nice to be able to display it on a PSD plot. Unfortunately, you can’t read the power directly from the plot. For example, the plotted spectral peak of a narrowband signal, such as a sinewave, is lower than the...
A Simpler Goertzel Algorithm
In this blog I propose a Goertzel algorithm that is simpler than the version of the Goertzel algorithm that is traditionally presented DSP textbooks. Below I very briefly describe the DSP textbook version of the Goertzel algorithm followed by a description of my proposed simpler algorithm.
The Traditional DSP Textbook Goertzel Algorithm
The so-called Goertzel algorithm is used to efficiently compute a single mth-bin sample of an N-point discrete Fourier transform (DFT) [1-4]. The...
60-Hz Noise and Baseline Drift Reduction in ECG Signal Processing
Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are obtained by monitoring the electrical activity of the human heart for medical diagnostic purposes [1]. This blog describes a very efficient digital filter used to reduce both 60 Hz AC power line noise and unwanted signal baseline drift that often contaminate ECG signals.
PDF_HERE
We'll first describe the ECG noise reduction filter and then examine the filter's performance in a real-world ECG signal filtering example.Proposed ECG Noise Reduction Digital...
Find Aliased ADC or DAC Harmonics (with animation)
When a sinewave is applied to a data converter (ADC or DAC), device nonlinearities produce harmonics. If a harmonic frequency is greater than the Nyquist frequency, the harmonic appears as an alias. In this case, it is not at once obvious if a given spur is a harmonic, and if so, its order. In this article, we’ll present Matlab code to simulate the data converter nonlinearities and find the harmonic alias frequencies. Note that Analog Devices has an online tool for...
Adaptive Beamforming is like Squeezing a Water Balloon
Adaptive beamforming was first developed in the 1960s for radar and sonar applications. The main idea is that signals can be captured using multiple sensors and the sensor outputs can be combined to enhance the signals propagating from specific directions and attenuate (null out) signals from other directions. It has grown immensely in recent years as processors have become faster and cheaper. Today, adaptive beamforming applications include smart speakers (like the Amazon Echo),...
Digital Envelope Detection: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Recently I've been thinking about the process of envelope detection. Tutorial information on this topic is readily available but that information is spread out over a number of DSP textbooks and many Internet web sites. The purpose of this blog is to summarize various digital envelope detection methods in one place.
Here I focus on envelope detection as it is applied to an amplitude-fluctuating sinusoidal signal where the positive-amplitude fluctuations (the sinusoid's envelope)...
Four Ways to Compute an Inverse FFT Using the Forward FFT Algorithm
If you need to compute inverse fast Fourier transforms (inverse FFTs) but you only have forward FFT software (or forward FFT FPGA cores) available to you, below are four ways to solve your problem.
Preliminaries To define what we're thinking about here, an N-point forward FFT and an N-point inverse FFT are described by:
$$ Forward \ FFT \rightarrow X(m) = \sum_{n=0}^{N-1} x(n)e^{-j2\pi nm/N} \tag{1} $$ $$ Inverse \ FFT \rightarrow x(n) = {1 \over N} \sum_{m=0}^{N-1}...Design IIR Butterworth Filters Using 12 Lines of Code
While there are plenty of canned functions to design Butterworth IIR filters [1], it’s instructive and not that complicated to design them from scratch. You can do it in 12 lines of Matlab code. In this article, we’ll create a Matlab function butter_synth.m to design lowpass Butterworth filters of any order. Here is an example function call for a 5th order filter:
N= 5 % Filter order fc= 10; % Hz cutoff freq fs= 100; % Hz sample freq [b,a]=...Ten Little Algorithms, Part 2: The Single-Pole Low-Pass Filter
Other articles in this series:
- Part 1: Russian Peasant Multiplication
- Part 3: Welford's Method (And Friends)
- Part 4: Topological Sort
- Part 5: Quadratic Extremum Interpolation and Chandrupatla's Method
- Part 6: Green’s Theorem and Swept-Area Detection
I’m writing this article in a room with a bunch of other people talking, and while sometimes I wish they would just SHUT UP, it would be...
A Beginner's Guide to OFDM
In the recent past, high data rate wireless communications is often considered synonymous to an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system. OFDM is a special case of multi-carrier communication as opposed to a conventional single-carrier system.
The concepts on which OFDM is based are so simple that almost everyone in the wireless community is a technical expert in this subject. However, I have always felt an absence of a really simple guide on how OFDM works which can...
Simplest Calculation of Half-band Filter Coefficients
Half-band filters are lowpass FIR filters with cut-off frequency of one-quarter of sampling frequency fs and odd symmetry about fs/4 [1]*. And it so happens that almost half of the coefficients are zero. The passband and stopband bandwiths are equal, making these filters useful for decimation-by-2 and interpolation-by-2. Since the zero coefficients make them computationally efficient, these filters are ubiquitous in DSP systems.
Here we will compute half-band...
The DFT Magnitude of a Real-valued Cosine Sequence
This blog may seem a bit trivial to some readers here but, then again, it might be of some value to DSP beginners. It presents a mathematical proof of what is the magnitude of an N-point discrete Fourier transform (DFT) when the DFT's input is a real-valued sinusoidal sequence.
To be specific, if we perform an N-point DFT on N real-valued time-domain samples of a discrete cosine wave, having exactly integer k cycles over N time samples, the peak magnitude of the cosine wave's...
Polyphase Filters and Filterbanks
ALONG CAME POLY
Polyphase filtering is a computationally efficient structure for applying resampling and filtering to a signal. Most digital filters can be applied in a polyphase format, and it is also possible to create efficient resampling filterbanks using the same theories.
This post will walk through a reference implementation of both the downsampling polyphase filter and a downsampling polyphase filterbank using scipy, numpy, matplotlib, and python. It should also highlight some of...
Handling Spectral Inversion in Baseband Processing
The problem of "spectral inversion" comes up fairly frequently in the context of signal processing for communication systems. In short, "spectral inversion" is the reversal of the orientation of the signal bandwidth with respect to the carrier frequency. Rick Lyons' article on "Spectral Flipping" at http://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/37.php discusses methods of handling the inversion (as shown in Figure 1a and 1b) at the signal center frequency. Since most communication systems process...
Design IIR Filters Using Cascaded Biquads
This article shows how to implement a Butterworth IIR lowpass filter as a cascade of second-order IIR filters, or biquads. We’ll derive how to calculate the coefficients of the biquads and do some examples using a Matlab function biquad_synth provided in the Appendix. Although we’ll be designing Butterworth filters, the approach applies to any all-pole lowpass filter (Chebyshev, Bessel, etc). As we’ll see, the cascaded-biquad design is less sensitive to coefficient...
Design IIR Butterworth Filters Using 12 Lines of Code
While there are plenty of canned functions to design Butterworth IIR filters [1], it’s instructive and not that complicated to design them from scratch. You can do it in 12 lines of Matlab code. In this article, we’ll create a Matlab function butter_synth.m to design lowpass Butterworth filters of any order. Here is an example function call for a 5th order filter:
N= 5 % Filter order fc= 10; % Hz cutoff freq fs= 100; % Hz sample freq [b,a]=...Computing FFT Twiddle Factors
Some days ago I read a post on the comp.dsp newsgroup and, if I understood the poster's words, it seemed that the poster would benefit from knowing how to compute the twiddle factors of a radix-2 fast Fourier transform (FFT).
Then, later it occurred to me that it might be useful for this blog's readers to be aware of algorithms for computing FFT twiddle factors. So,... what follows are two algorithms showing how to compute the individual twiddle factors of an N-point decimation-in-frequency...
Handling Spectral Inversion in Baseband Processing
The problem of "spectral inversion" comes up fairly frequently in the context of signal processing for communication systems. In short, "spectral inversion" is the reversal of the orientation of the signal bandwidth with respect to the carrier frequency. Rick Lyons' article on "Spectral Flipping" at http://www.dsprelated.com/showarticle/37.php discusses methods of handling the inversion (as shown in Figure 1a and 1b) at the signal center frequency. Since most communication systems process...
Four Ways to Compute an Inverse FFT Using the Forward FFT Algorithm
If you need to compute inverse fast Fourier transforms (inverse FFTs) but you only have forward FFT software (or forward FFT FPGA cores) available to you, below are four ways to solve your problem.
Preliminaries To define what we're thinking about here, an N-point forward FFT and an N-point inverse FFT are described by:
$$ Forward \ FFT \rightarrow X(m) = \sum_{n=0}^{N-1} x(n)e^{-j2\pi nm/N} \tag{1} $$ $$ Inverse \ FFT \rightarrow x(n) = {1 \over N} \sum_{m=0}^{N-1}...The DFT Magnitude of a Real-valued Cosine Sequence
This blog may seem a bit trivial to some readers here but, then again, it might be of some value to DSP beginners. It presents a mathematical proof of what is the magnitude of an N-point discrete Fourier transform (DFT) when the DFT's input is a real-valued sinusoidal sequence.
To be specific, if we perform an N-point DFT on N real-valued time-domain samples of a discrete cosine wave, having exactly integer k cycles over N time samples, the peak magnitude of the cosine wave's...
Python scipy.signal IIR Filtering: An Example
Introduction
In the last posts I reviewed how to use the Python scipy.signal package to design digital infinite impulse response (IIR) filters, specifically, using the iirdesign function (IIR design I and IIR design II ). In this post I am going to conclude the IIR filter design review with an example.
Previous posts:
Use Matlab Function pwelch to Find Power Spectral Density – or Do It Yourself
In my last post, we saw that finding the spectrum of a signal requires several steps beyond computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT)[1]. These include windowing the signal, taking the magnitude-squared of the DFT, and computing the vector of frequencies. The Matlab function pwelch [2] performs all these steps, and it also has the option to use DFT averaging to compute the so-called Welch power spectral density estimate [3,4].
In this article, I’ll present some...
Free DSP Books on the Internet
While surfing the "net" I have occasionally encountered signal processing books whose chapters could be downloaded to my computer. I started keeping a list of those books and, over the years, that list has grown to over forty books. Perhaps the list will be of interest to you.
Please know, all of the listed books are copyrighted. The copyright holders have graciously provided their books free of charge for downloading for individual use, but multiple copies must not be made or printed. As...
Understanding and Relating Eb/No, SNR, and other Power Efficiency Metrics
Introduction
Evaluating the performance of communication systems, and wireless systems in particular, usually involves quantifying some performance metric as a function of Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (SNR) or some similar measurement. Many systems require performance evaluation in multipath channels, some in Doppler conditions and other impairments related to mobility. Some have interference metrics to measure against, but nearly all include noise power as an impairment. Not all systems are...
A Beginner's Guide To Cascaded Integrator-Comb (CIC) Filters
This blog discusses the behavior, mathematics, and implementation of cascaded integrator-comb filters.
Cascaded integrator-comb (CIC) digital filters are computationally-efficient implementations of narrowband lowpass filters, and are often embedded in hardware implementations of decimation, interpolation, and delta-sigma converter filtering.
After describing a few applications of CIC filters, this blog introduces their structure and behavior, presents the frequency-domain...
Sensors Expo - Trip Report & My Best Video Yet!
This was my first time at Sensors Expo and my second time in Silicon Valley and I must say I had a great time.
Before I share with you what I find to be, by far, my best 'highlights' video yet for a conference/trade show, let me try to entertain you with a few anecdotes from this trip. If you are not interested by my stories or maybe don't have the extra minutes needed to read them, please feel free to skip to the end of this blog post to watch the...
Who else is going to Sensors Expo in San Jose? Looking for roommate(s)!
This will be my first time attending this show and I must say that I am excited. I am bringing with me my cameras and other video equipment with the intention to capture as much footage as possible and produce a (hopefully) fun to watch 'highlights' video. I will also try to film as many demos as possible and share them with you.
I enjoy going to shows like this one as it gives me the opportunity to get out of my home-office (from where I manage and run the *Related sites) and actually...
Crowdfunding Articles?
Many of you have the knowledge and talent to write technical articles that would benefit the EE community. What is missing for most of you though, and very understandably so, is the time and motivation to do it.
But what if you could make some money to compensate for your time spent on writing the article(s)? Would some of you find the motivation and make the time?
I am thinking of implementing a system/mechanism that would allow the EE community to...
Embedded World 2018 - More Videos!
After the interview videos last week, this week I am very happy to release two more videos taken at Embedded World 2018 and that I am proud of.
For both videos, I made extensive use of my two new toys, a Zhiyun Crane Gimbal and a Sony a6300 camera.
The use of a gimbal like the Zhiyun makes a big difference in terms of making the footage look much more stable and cinematographic.
As for the Sony camera, it takes fantastic slow-motion footage and...
Embedded World 2018 - The Interviews
Once again this year, I had the chance to go to Embedded World in Nuremberg Germany. And once again this year, I brought my video equipment to try and capture some of the most interesting things at the show.
Something new this year, I asked Jacob Beningo if he would partner with me in doing interviews with a few vendors. I would operate the camera while Jacob would ask the right questions to the vendors to make them talk about the key products/features that...
Finally got a drone!
As a reader of my blog, you already know that I have been making videos lately and thoroughly enjoying the process. When I was in Germany early this summer (and went 280 km/h in a porsche!) to produce SEGGER's 25th anniversary video, the company bought a drone so we could get an aerial shot of the party (at about the 1:35 mark in this video). Since then, I have been obsessing on buying a drone for myself and finally made the move a few weeks ago - I acquired a used DJI...
SEGGER's 25th Anniversary Video
Chances are you will find this video more interesting to watch if you take five minutes to first read the story of the week I spent at SEGGER's headquarters at the end of June.
The video is only a little more than 2 minutes long. If you decide to watch it, make sure to go full screen and I would really love to read your thoughts about it in the comments down bellow. Do you think a video like this succeeds in making the viewer want to learn more about the company?...
Went 280km/h (174mph) in a Porsche Panamera in Germany!
Those of you who've been following my blog lately already know that I am going through some sort of mid-life crisis that involves going out there to meet people and make videos. It all started with Embedded World early this year, then continued at ESC Boston a couple of months ago and the latest chapter just concluded as I returned from Germany after spending a week at SEGGER's headquarters to produce a video to highlight their 25th anniversary.
Going back to Germany!
A couple of blog posts ago, I wrote that the decision to go to ESC Boston ended up being a great one for many different reasons. I came back from the conference energized and really happy that I went.
These feelings were amplified a few days after my return when I received an email from Rolf Segger, the founder of SEGGER Microcontroller (check out their very new website), asking if I would be interested in visiting their headquarters...
ESC Boston's Videos are Now Up
In my last blog, I told you about my experience at ESC Boston and the few videos that I was planning to produce and publish. Here they are, please have a look and any feedback (positive or negative) is appreciated.
Short HighlightThis is a very short (one minute) montage of some of the footage that I shot at the show & conference. In future shows, I absolutely need to insert clips here and there of engineers saying a few words about the conference (why they...
