ECEN 390 - Laser Tag Project

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====== Milestone 2, Task 1: Design 10 Bandpass Filters ======

===== Overview =====
Remember that the basic operation of the system involves the following operations:
  - Convert the received signal into a sampled (at 10 ksamples/s) discrete-time digital signal
  - Pass the signal through 10 bandpass filters with center frequencies of the 10 players
  - Determine if the target was hit (i.e., the signal is not just noise)
  - Determine the player

One of the essential parts of this basic operation is the bank of bandpass filters.  You already designed and tested this bank of filters on sampled data that was provided to you during Lab #5 in 380.  In this task, you are going to make sure that your filter bank is working by testing it with simulated signals at the different player frequencies.

==== General Requirements ====
This milestone requires the design, analysis, and testing of the bank of 10 bandpass filters in MATLAB.  You will look at both frequency and time domain analysis of the involved signals and filters.

==== General Notes ====
  * In this first task, you will assume your signal is already down-sampled to 10 ksamples/s.  However, remember that the ZYBO board will be sampling the continuous-time signal from your receiver boards at 100 ksamples/s.  You will design the down-sampling system to go from the 100 ksamples/s signal to the 10 ksamples/s signal in Task 2.
  * Use player frequencies of 1471, 1724, 2000, 2273, 2632, 2941, 3333, 3571, 3846, 4167 (all in Hz).

==== Specifications ====
The 10 bandpass filters should be IIR filters with the following specifications.
  * Butterworth bandpass filter configuration with center frequencies of each player
  * Filter length of 11
  * Equal filter bandwidths for all 10 filters
  * Attenuation of adjacent player frequency < -20 dB
  * Player frequencies: 1471, 1724, 2000, 2273, 2632, 2941, 3333, 3571, 3846, 4167 (all in Hz)
  * Pulse length 200 ms (NOTE: A pulse length of 200 ms sampled at a frequency of 10 ksamples/s will yield a signal with 2000 total samples.)

==== Pass Off ====
**The following items need to be shown to the TAs (in person or over Zoom).**
  - Frequency response plot of the 10 filters overlaid in both linear and decibel scales {{ :m_2_1_1.jpg?100 |}}
  - Plots of total power of 200 ms long square wave through each filter  (There should be 10 of these plots corresponding to a square wave for each of the player frequencies.) {{ :power.jpg?200 |}}
  - List of filter coefficients for the 10 bandpass filters

====== Resources ======

===== Motivation =====
As you know, the laser tag system supports 10 players each with an assigned frequency in the range of 1.4 - 4.2 kHz.  If the receiver is being illuminated or 'hit' by a laser tag gun then the sampled signal will consist of both a square wave at a particular frequency and noise. The system needs to analyze the received signal to determine whether the sampled signal contains a 'hit' by a laser tag gun.  As the shooting gun gets farther away from the receiver, the amplitude of the square wave signal from the shooting gun gets smaller.  Since the noise amplitude stays the same, this corresponds to a lower SNR, and it gets harder to distinguish the signal from the noise. This figure shows a square wave added to a random noise signal:

{{ :square_example.jpg?200 |}}

It will be easy for you to see the square wave in the close range signal, when the SNR is high.  However, for longer-range signals, it will just look like noise even though there is a square wave embedded in the signal.  The beauty of your signal processing system will be in its ability to detect a hit in the noisy received signal even at relatively large ranges. 

The 'hit' signal has a frequency spectrum concentrated at the modulating frequency, while the noise is spread out over a wider frequency band (as we'll see in Task 2).  A simple method to extract the signal from the noise would be to compute a Fourier transform of the received signal, and then see if there is a spike in frequency at one of the player frequencies.

Unfortunately, computing a Fourier transform of the incoming signal requires too much computation time to enable it to be performed in real-time by our system.  Therefore, we are effectively going to make a 'coarse' Fourier transform using our bank of 10 bandpass filters, and see if there is a spike in the signal energy coming out of any of the filters.  This is computationally much more efficient, and can be implemented in real time (provided we keep the order of our filter low enough).


===== Filter Design =====
You should start by reviewing the lab from ECE380 in which you designed digital filters.  For convenience, here are links to both Lab #5 in 380 and the supplementary filter design handout:

{{:lab5_fall2018.pdf|Lab #5 from 380}}
{{::filter_design_notes.pdf|Supplementary filter design handout from Dr. Rice}}

We are going to be using an Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) digital filter.  Wikipedia has a description of this type of filter ([[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_impulse_response]]).  You should read through this description.  The IIR digital filter is characterized by two sets of coefficients called a and b.  

There are lots of different filter designs that have already been developed.  A few of the common types of filters are Butterworth, Chebyshev, and Elliptic.  MATLAB has functions that produce the coefficients (a and b) for these filters.  Let’s use the Butterworth filter for this example. Review the description of the Butterworth filter on Wikipedia ([[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterworth_filter]]).  At the bottom of the Wikipedia page there is a comparison to the other common types of digital filters.

The MATLAB command is 'butter'. Typically when you are learning how to use a new command in MATLAB you type 
<code> help butter </code> on the MATLAB command line to get some help.  In this case here is a more detailed help on using the [[MATLAB |butter and filter MATLAB commands.]]

//IMPORTANT:  The 'butter' command in MATLAB takes frequencies in units of 'half-cycles/sample'.  You can think of this as a normalized frequency in the range of 0 to 1, where one corresponds to half your sampling frequency.  It simply tells you how many half-cycles your signal goes through per sample.  The easiest way to get these normalized frequencies in half-cycles/sample is to divide your frequency in Hz by half the sample rate.  I suggest keeping all of your frequencies in your MATLAB code as human readable Hz, and then simply divide your frequencies in Hz by half your sample rate when you pass them to the butter command.//

The design parameter (what you can change) are (1) the filter type (i.e., Butterworth, Chebyshev, etc.), (2) the filter order, and (3) the cutoff frequencies.

To make it easier for the TAs to help we are going to limit the number of design parameters.  We want you all to use the Butterworth filter design.  To limit computational complexity so your filters can operate in real time on the ZYBO board, we are also going to limit the length of each IIR filter to 11 (i.e., the b and a vectors each have a length of 11).  Note that this corresponds to a Butterworth filter order of 10, since a polynomial with 11 coefficients has 10 roots (the numbers of poles or zeros). This means that the only design parameters we are varying are the cutoff frequencies of the filters.

Each Butterworth bandpass filter has two frequency corners.  It should pass signals with frequency between these two frequencies and attenuate all other frequency components.  Review the code provided in 380 Lab #5 Task #3 that shows you how to set the corner frequencies for player 1, create the bandpass Butterworth filter, and generate the a and b coefficients for the filter.

Once you have created the filter coefficients for each of your filters, **please save the coefficients off into double precision ascii files.**  This will allow you to easily load the filters into the ZYBO board in the future.  If the MATLAB variable a1 holds your a coefficients for the player 1 frequency filter, then the following code would save those coefficients to an ascii file called a1.txt:

<code>
save a1.txt a1 -ascii -double
</code>

//Note: If we were making a true Coarse Frequency Domain calculation the filter would need to cover the entire band between the different player frequencies.  However, in this system we have a discrete set of allowable frequencies.  The filter just needs to pass one of these allowable frequencies to see if the receiver is 'hit'.  Therefore, the bandwidth of the filter just needs to cover the specific allowable frequency that it is assigned.  This means that the narrower the bandwidth the more noise that is rejected and the better the performance of the system.  However, this assumes that the frequency of the transmitter does not changes at all.  Therefore, we need to create some bandwidth to allow wobble in the player frequency.  How much bandwidth is actually needed would need to be determined experimentally. In this example we created a bandwidth of 50 Hz. This can be optimized after the system is built if you want to optimize the range of your system.    //
===== Bandpass Filter Analysis =====
To determine whether the Butterworth filters are designed properly we need to analyze the filters.  The filter analysis will include both a frequency domain and time domain analysis.

==== Frequency Domain Bandpass Filter Analysis ====
In the frequency domain each bandpass filter should have a flat transfer function around the frequency that the filter is supposed to pass and then decrease as the frequency gets farther away from the frequency corners.  You can plot the frequency domain transfer function using the [[MATLAB |MATLAB freqz function.]]

//NOTE:  I suggest using the following form of freqz:  freqz(b, a, f, f_s) where b and a are the filter coefficients, f is a frequency vector containing exactly the frequencies (in Hz) that you want to evaluate the filter at, and f_s is the sampling frequency in Hz.  Then you can simply plot the output of freqz against your frequency axis f.//

You should create a frequency domain plot for each of the bandpass filters and overlay them on the same plot.  The result should look similar to the following.

{{ :m_2_1_1.jpg?100 |}}

The horizontal axis should be in frequency and cover the entire allowable frequency band (0<f<5kHz).

==== Time Domain Bandpass Filter Analysis ====

The bandpass filters will eventually be implemented (in a later milestone) in the time domain on the ZYBO board, since frequency-domain processing would be too computationally expensive (as we've previously mentioned).  We therefore will need to analyze the output of each filter in the time domain, and determine whether a hit was registered.  We will now walk you through the basic process of testing your filter bank by (1) simulating a time domain square wave signal at one of the player frequencies, (2) filtering the square wave signal with your filter bank, (3) computing the energy (in the time domain) of each filtered signal, and (4) determining which frequency the hit was at based on the signal energies.

The basic steps of the time domain analysis are the following.
  - Create a square wave
    - Sampling frequency Fs = 10 ksamples/s
    - Frequency of one of the assigned player frequencies (you'll do this for all 10 frequencies)
    - Pulse length of 200ms (which corresponds to 2000 total samples since the sampling frequency is 10 ksamples/s)
  - Filter the square wave
    - Pass the signal through each of the 10 bandpass filters
  - Compute the total energy in each filtered signal
    - Square each sample in the signal, and then sum all 2000 squared samples
  - Plot the 10 energies
  - Repeat the process for the next player frequency

=== Help ===
Let's walk through this process for the first player.

**Step 1**: Create a square wave

Use the MATLAB function 'square'.  The square command is similar to the sin command except that it produces a square wave rather than a sine wave. Here is the MATLAB code to create the square wave:
<code>
Fs = 10e3;                   % The sampling frequency
t = linspace(0, 0.2, 2000);  % The time vector with a length of 0.2 seconds and 2000 total samples
freq = 1471;                 % The frequency of player 1
x = square(2*pi*freq*t);     % Create the time domain square wave
</code>

**Step 2**: Filter the square wave

As you know, the bandpass filters have two arrays of coefficients (a and b) that define the IIR digital filters.  In a future milestone, you will implement these filters in the time domain using the queue code you developed in Milestone 1.  However, we are going to keep things simple during our testing and simply use the built-in MATLAB function 'filter' to perform the actual filtering in this milestone.  We need to filter the square wave signal that we created using each of our 10 bandpass filters (we called the square wave signal x in our previous code snippet).  You already reviewed how to use the filter command when you learned how to use the butter MATLAB command.    [[MATLAB |If you need another review go here.]]

Plot the output of the filter command (operating on your square wave signal) for each of the 10 bandpass filters.  The following plot shows the output of the first 4 bandpass filters when the square wave input has a frequency of 1471 Hz (the frequency for player 1):

{{ :filtered2.jpg?100 |}}

You can see from this plot that filters 2, 3, and 4 attenuate the signal a lot compared to filter 1 (look at the amplitudes of each filtered signal).  The output of filter 1 has a much higher amplitude.  If you zoom in on the output of filter 1 you should be able to see that the square wave was changed into a sine wave by the filter.  (Do you understand why this happens?  Remember that the square wave signal contains a sinusoid at the fundamental frequency, as well as higher frequency harmonics that give it a square shape.  Our bandpass filter effectively takes out the higher harmonic frequencies that make it a square wave, leaving only the sinusoid at the fundamental frequency!)

**Step 3**: Compute the energy in each filtered signal

Looking at the outputs of the 10 filters, it is evident that when the square wave has a frequency that matches the frequency of a filter, the amplitude of the filtered signal will be much higher.  You need a way of robustly determining which filtered signal has the highest average amplitude.  However, if you simply take the largest value in each filtered signal, the system will be very susceptible to noise.  A better way is to determine the total energy in each signal.

The total energy in a signal is found by squaring each sample and then summing all of the squared samples.  In our implementation, we are looking at 200ms snapshots of our signals, because that is the duration of our shots.  These 200ms snapshots are sampled at 10 ksamples/s, yielding 2000 total samples.  Thus, the summation for our signal energy calculation is only going to be over 2000 samples.

Now that we have computed the energy of each filtered signal, we can create our coarse Fourier transform.  We take the summation of the 2000 squared samples through each of the 10 bandpass filters and create an array.  We then plot a bar graph for each of the array values.  MATLAB has a command to create a bar graph called 'stairs'.

Your resulting bar graph produced using the square wave with the frequency for player 1 should look like this:

{{ :power.jpg?200 |}}

You should produce 10 of these plots, one for each of the 10 player frequencies.


===== What is Needed in the Lab Report =====
  - Description of your IIR bandpass filters
    - List of the filter coefficients
    - Plots of the frequency-domain transfer functions of your filters (using freqz)
    - Description of the key components of the plots
  - Description of the analysis of the filtered signals
    - Filtered square wave signal pulse energy calculation
    - Coarse frequency domain bar graph plots
    - Description of the pertinent features of the plots 

===== Milestone 2, Task 1 Pass Off =====

The following plots need to be shown.
  - Frequency response plot of the 10 filters overlaid in both linear and decibel scales {{ :m_2_1_1.jpg?100 |}}
  - Plots of total energy of 200 ms long square wave through each filter  (There should be 10 of these plots, one for each player frequency) {{ :m_2_1_2.jpg?100 |}}
  - List of filter coefficients for each of the 10 bandpass filters
ECEN 390 - Laser Tag Project

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