Book Image

Arduino Essentials

Book Image

Arduino Essentials

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Arduino Essentials
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Dealing with analog signals


As an introduction to the connection and programming of analog outputs, we will use the simplest circuit we have already seen, that is, we will connect an LED to our Arduino board but to deal with it analogically this time.

Before going into the details, I would like to introduce a couple of concepts that will help you when working with these kinds of signals.

The first thing you should know is that Arduino isn't really able to generate an infinite continuous analog signal, but instead, it uses a little trick to simulate it. Digital devices such as microcontrollers usually incorporate a peripheral called Digital to Analog Converter (DAC), which they use specially to perform this trick.

When working with a microcontroller, we pass a digital value to the DAC, and it converts it to an analog value but in a predefined range of possible values. The DAC is unable to generate an infinite set of output values; it has a finite input range of digital values and can generate...