A Quick and Dirty Real-

time Digital (IIR/FIR)

Filter Implementation
MAY 31ST, 2013 | COMMENTS
Introduction
You have this Data Acquisition System that coughs out data in real time, and you
want to add a digital filter that takes each filter sample, throws out the filtered
output. Thats the task of this post.
Lets say the digital data is over your computers serial port, and you have set up
some Matlab code to plot it already, now we need to filter each sample before
storing it for plotting.
First of all you need to decide what kind of filter you want to use low
pass/bandpass etc, butterworth/elliptic etc, the filters order, cutoff frequency etc.
And depending on all that use the matlab functions like butter(), ellip() to get the
coefficients of the filter you want to use. You could calculate the coefficients by
any other method also. This post assumes that you already have the filter
coefficients and you just need some simple code to implement the filter.
Now that you have the coefficients usually denoted by the vectors a and b for the
denominator and numerator respectively, lets look at the general form of an IIR
filter
H(z)=Pi=0bizi1+Qj=1ajzj
Make sure that in your coefficients, a(0)=1.
Use the following code to implement the above filter:
1
2
[b_lp,a_lp] = butter(8,40/(Fs/2),'low');
global dbuffer ;
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30

dbuffer = zeros(length(b_lp),1); % buffer for LPF
%....... Read the ADC value from the serialport...
% Pass it to the filter subfunction
filtered_value = NewFilter(b_lp, a_lp, value);
%..... Plot data....

% NewFilter subfunction
function [data] = NewFilter(b, a,value)
k = 1;
global dbuffer ;
while(k<length(b))
dbuffer(k) = dbuffer(k+1);
k=k+1;
end
dbuffer(length(b)) = 0;
k = 1;
while(k<(length(b)+1))
dbuffer(k) = dbuffer(k) + value * b(k);
k=k+1;
end

k = 1;
while(k<length(b))
dbuffer(k+1) = dbuffer(k+1) - dbuffer(1) * a(k+1);
k=k+1;
end

data = dbuffer(1);

Thats all to it! Now consider an FIR filter, this is easier because now we do not
have the vector a , so just delete the Multiply and accumulate loop for the a terms
in the above code.
A moving average filter can also be implemented in a similar fashion. The code
looks like this:
1 function [data] = MavgFilter(value)
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19


k = 1;
global Dbuffer ;
global N;
% 1. shift by one element (discard the left most element)
while(k<N)
Dbuffer(k) = Dbuffer(k+1);
k=k+1;
end
Dbuffer(N) = 0;

k = 1;
while(k<N+1)
Dbuffer(k) = Dbuffer(k) + value;
k=k+1;
end

data = Dbuffer(1)/N;

Obviously, the same code can be used in any other language like C, or C# if you
want to do analysis using them. And also note that this is not the most efficient
implementation, but its easy to understand and quick to implement, so its
always good for a first try.
http://www.desultoryquest.com/blog/a-quick-and-dirty-real-time-digital-iir-slash-fir-filter-
implementation/