Its interesting how little real information about this topic there is on the web !!! There are reams of paper dedicated to learned treatises and another set of reams of paper ( and articles) dedicated to so called practical methods of design but we find these of little value to a practicing engineer unless that practicing engineer is willing to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort to sift through a lot of unnecessary information about FIR filter design. To put it simply you have two pieces of information you need to do the task. Either you have an arbitrary frequency response you want to implement as a FIR filter or you have an impulse response you want to use to implement a FIR filter. The frequency response is the “FFT” of the impulse response while the impulse response is the reverse. It is our intention to present in these posts the details of techniques that allow an engineer to do this in a considered and logical fashion. Of course there is always MATLAB to fall back on, except MATLAB is an expensive piece of software. There is also OCTAVE but this is all but impossible to use or install correctly. However, it does have the merit of being very inexpensive .Also the mechanics of how you use FIR2, FIR1 etc is hidden so it is not instructive. Of course many engineers may find this an advantage. We feel that there is more to FIR filter design than just running MATLAB scripts. Please visit our website for more information on related topics.