There’s an old saying: Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn. I’m guilty of this in a big way — I was never much on classroom learning. But if I build something or write some code, I’m more likely to understand how it works and why.
Circuit simulation and software workbooks like Matlab and Jupyter are great for being able to build things without a lot of overhead. But these all have some learning curve and often use clever tricks, abstractions, or library calls to obscure what’s really happening. Sometimes it is easier to build something in a spreadsheet. In fact, I often do little circuit design spreadsheets or even digital design because it forces me to create a mathematical model which, in turn, helps me understand what’s really going on.
In this article I’m going to use Google Sheets — although you could do the same tricks in just about any spreadsheet — to generate some data and apply a finite impulse response (FIR) filter to it. Of course, if you had a spreadsheet of data from an instrument, this same technique would work, too.
This is the first of a series about developing intuition and understanding of signal processing using — mostly — spreadsheets. You probably won’t get a lot of practical use out of this — although if you were logging data from a sensor into a spreadsheet and wanted to filter the readings, this might be your go-to technique. By necessity, we need to learn a bit about generating signals mathematically, but since that’s fairly easy, I’m going to put off the details for a future installment. However, for just about any signal processing job we want to do we’ll need filters. Ther ..
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