## An Efficient Linear Interpolation Scheme

This blog presents a computationally-efficient linear interpolation trick that requires at most one multiply per output sample.

Background: Linear Interpolation

Looking at Figure 1(a) let's assume we have two points, [x(0),y(0)] and [x(1),y(1)], and we want to compute the value y, on the line joining those two points, associated with the value x.

Figure 1: Linear interpolation: given x, x(0), x(1), y(0), and y(1), compute the value of y. ...

## An Alternative Form of the Pure Real Tone DFT Bin Value Formula

December 17, 2017
Introduction

This is an article to hopefully give a better understanding of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) by deriving alternative exact formulas for the bin values of a real tone in a DFT. The derivation of the source equations can be found in my earlier blog article titled "DFT Bin Value Formulas for Pure Real Tones"[1]. The new form is slighty more complicated and calculation intensive, but it is more computationally accurate in the vicinity of near integer frequencies. This...

## 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:

## Feedback Controllers - Making Hardware with Firmware. Part 6. Self-Calibration Related.

This article will consider the engineering of a self-calibration & self-test capability to enable the project hardware to be configured and its basic performance evaluated and verified, ready for the development of the low-latency controller DSP firmware and closed-loop applications. Performance specifications will be documented in due course, on the project website here.

• Part 6: Self-Calibration, Measurements and Signalling (this part)
• Part 5:

## Simplest Calculation of Half-band Filter Coefficients

November 20, 2017

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...

## Feedback Controllers - Making Hardware with Firmware. Part 5. Some FPGA Aspects.

November 14, 2017
This part of the on-going series of articles looks at a variety of aspects concerning the FPGA device which provides the high-speed maths capability for the low-latency controller and the arbitrary circuit generator application. In due course a complete specification along with  application  examples will be maintained on the project website here.

## Improved Three Bin Exact Frequency Formula for a Pure Real Tone in a DFT

November 6, 2017
Introduction

This is an article to hopefully give a better understanding of the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) by extending the exact two bin formulas for the frequency of a real tone in a DFT to the three bin case. This article is a direct extension of my prior article "Two Bin Exact Frequency Formulas for a Pure Real Tone in a DFT"[1]. The formulas derived in the previous article are also presented in this article in the computational order, rather than the indirect order they were...

## There's No End to It -- Matlab Code Plots Frequency Response above the Unit Circle

Reference [1] has some 3D plots of frequency response magnitude above the unit circle in the Z-plane.  I liked them enough that I wrote a Matlab function to plot the response of any digital filter this way.  I’m not sure how useful these plots are, but they’re fun to look at. The Matlab code is listed in the Appendix.

This post is available in PDF format for easy...

## There and Back Again: Time of Flight Ranging between Two Wireless Nodes

With the growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) products, the number of applications requiring an estimate of range between two wireless nodes in indoor channels is growing very quickly as well. Therefore, localization is becoming a red hot market today and will remain so in the coming years.

One question that is perplexing is that many companies now a days are offering cm level accurate solutions using RF signals. The conventional wireless nodes usually implement synchronization...

## Feedback Controllers - Making Hardware with Firmware. Part 4. Engineering of Evaluation Hardware

October 10, 2017
Following on from the previous abstract descriptions of an arbitrary circuit emulation application for low-latency feedback controllers, we now come to some aspects in the hardware engineering of an evaluation design from concept to first power-up. In due course a complete specification along with  application  examples will be maintained on the project website.

## Python scipy.signal IIR Filter Design

Introduction

The following is an introduction on how to design an infinite impulse response (IIR) filters using the Python scipy.signal package.  This post, mainly, covers how to use the scipy.signal package and is not a thorough introduction to IIR filter design.  For complete coverage of IIR filter design and structure see one of the references.

Filter Specification

Before providing some examples lets review the specifications for a filter design.  A filter...

## Embedded Toolbox: Programmer's Calculator

Like any craftsman, I have accumulated quite a few tools during my embedded software development career. Some of them proved to me more useful than others. And these generally useful tools ended up in my Embedded Toolbox. In this blog, I'd like to share some of my tools with you. Today, I'd like to start with my cross-platform Programmer's Calculator called QCalc.

## Delay estimation by FFT

Given x=sig(t) and y=ref(t), returns [c, ref(t+delta), delta)] = fitSignal(y, x);:Estimates and corrects delay and scaling factor between two signals Code snippet

This article relates to the Matlab / Octave code snippet: Delay estimation with subsample resolution It explains the algorithm and the design decisions behind it.

Introduction

There are many DSP-related problems, where an unknown timing between two signals needs to be determined and corrected, for example, radar, sonar,...

## 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)...

## 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...

## Music/Audio Signal Processing

Greetings,

This is my blog from the point of view of a music/audio DSP research engineer / educator. It is informal and largely nontechnical because nearly everything I have to say about signal processing is (or will be) somewhere in my four-book series: Mathematics of DFT with Audio Applications, Introduction to Digital Filters, Physical Audio Signal Processing and

## Sum of Two Equal-Frequency Sinusoids

Some time ago I reviewed the manuscript of a book being considered by the IEEE Press publisher for possible publication. In that manuscript the author presented the following equation:

Being unfamiliar with Eq. (1), and being my paranoid self, I wondered if that equation is indeed correct. Not finding a stock trigonometric identity in my favorite math reference book to verify Eq. (1), I modeled both sides of the equation using software. Sure enough, Eq. (1) is not correct. So then I...

## PID Without a PhD

I both consult and teach in the area of digital control. Through both of these efforts, I have found that while there certainly are control problems that require all the expertise I can bring to bear, there are a great number of control problems that can be solved with the most basic knowledge of simple controllers, without resort to any formal control theory at all.

This article will tell you how to implement a simple controller in software and how to tune it without getting into heavy...

## Four Ways to Compute an Inverse FFT Using the Forward FFT Algorithm

July 7, 20151 comment

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}...

## 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...

## The New Forum is LIVE!

February 18, 20161 comment

After months of hard word, I am very excited to introduce to you the new forum interface.

Here are the key features:

1- Easily add images to a post by drag & dropping the images in the editor

2- Easily attach files to a post by drag & dropping the files in the editor

3- Add latex equations to a post and they will be rendered with Mathjax (tutorial)

4- Add a code snippet and surround the code with

## Helping New Bloggers to Break the Ice: A New Ipad Pro for the Author with the Best Article!

November 9, 2015

Breaking the ice can be tough.  Over the years, many individuals have asked to be given access to the blogging interface only to never post an article.  Maybe they underestimated the time it takes to write a decent article, or maybe they got cold feet. I don't blame or judge them at all - how many times in my life have I had the intention to do something but didn't follow through?  Once, maybe twice 😉 (don't worry if you don't...

## Welcoming MANY New Bloggers!

The response to the latest call for bloggers has been amazing and I am very grateful.

In this post I present to you the individuals who, so far (I am still receiving applications at an impressive rate and will update this page as more bloggers are added),  have been given access to the blogging interface.  I am very pleased with the positive response and I think the near future will see the publication of many great articles, given the quality of the...

## Recruiting New Bloggers!

Previous calls for bloggers have been very successful in recruiting some great communicators - Rick LyonsJason Sachs, Victor Yurkovsky, Mike Silva, Markus NentwigGene BrenimanStephen Friederichs,

Chances are that by now, you have had a chance to browse the new design of the *related site that I published several weeks ago.  I have been working for several months on this and I must admit that I am very happy with the results.  This new design will serve as a base for many new exciting developments. I would love to hear your comments/suggestions if you have any, please use the comments system at the bottom of this page.

First on my list would be to build and launch a new forum...

## The Sampling Theorem - An Intuitive Approach

January 26, 20151 comment

Scott Kurtz from DSPSoundWare.com has put together a video presentation that aims to help DSPers gain a better intuitive understanding of the Sampling Theorem.   Feel free to have a look and share your thoughts by commenting this blog post.

## DSP Related Math: Nice Animated GIFs

I was browsing the ECE subreddit lately and found that some of the most popular posts over the last few months have been animated GIFs helping understand some mathematical concepts.  I thought there would be some value in aggregating the DSP related gifs on one page.

The relationship between sin, cos, and right triangles: Constructing a square wave with infinite series (see this...

## DSPRelated and EmbeddedRelated now on Facebook & I will be at EE Live!

I have two news to share with you today.

The first one is that I finally created Facebook pages for DSPRelated.com and EmbeddedRelated (DSPRelated page - EmbeddedRelated page). For a long time I didn't feel that this was something that was needed, but it seems that these days more and more people are using their Facebook account to stay updated with their favorite websites. In any event, if you have a Facebook account, I would greatly appreciate if you could use the next 5 seconds to "like"...

## Collaborative Writing Experiment: Your Favorite DSP Websites

May 30, 2013

You are invited to contribute to the content of this blog post through the magic of Google Docs' real time collaboration feature.

I discovered this tool several months ago when I was looking for a way to coordinate our annual family halloween party (potluck) and avoid the very unpleasant situation of ending up with too much chips and not enough chocolate (first world problem!).  It was amusing to keep an eye on the "food you will bring" document we had created for this and watch...