From the course: Learning Arduino: Interfacing with Analog Devices

Understanding analog-to-digital converters - Arduino Tutorial

From the course: Learning Arduino: Interfacing with Analog Devices

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Understanding analog-to-digital converters

“

- [Narrator] Let's start with how the Arduino board handles analog inputs. When working with analog input signals, the Arduino board uses an analog to digital converter or ADC. This converts analog signals coming from the external devices into digital values that the microcontroller can work with. The digital value is scaled based on the value of the analog signal. Then the Arduino software reads the digital value produced by the ADC and uses it to determine the value of the original analog signal. Most of the Arduino boards have an ADC with a 10-bit resolution. This means that it returns integers from zero to 1,023. For an analog input between zero and five volt, the analog to digital conversion returns zero for an input of zero volt and 1,023 for an input of five volts. The same thing applies when having a voltage reference of 3.3 volts. So zero, for an input of zero volts and 1,023 for the maximum voltage, which in this case, is 3.3 volts. Each Arduino units include an ADC for each analog pin for sensing analog input voltages and converting them into digital values. The analog ADC is a 10-bit resolution. There are some exceptions that have 12-bit ADC. The only difference is that this will return values between zero and 4,095. You can read more about the Arduino board resolution by going to this link.

Contents