FIR Averaging
A consistent issue with the Arduino capacitance sensor is data noise. After speaking with Professor Holtrop, he suggested we try finite impulse response (FIR) averaging. After some searching, we found the Arduino tutorial on smoothing analog input data to have an effective method for FIR averages. \cite{9imb02} This code is implemented in section \ref{266990} but was not used in the final product. The FIR averaging failed at higher capacitance values, giving negative readings due to the way the Arduino capacitance sensing library handled overloading. Due to time constraints, we opted to use the noisy data over the FIR averaged data. In a second look at this project, we would spend a considerably larger amount of time working through this method for averaging, as it would provide a much-needed increase in quality to the collected data.