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Arduino Essentials

You're reading from   Arduino Essentials Enter the world of Arduino and its peripherals and start creating interesting projects

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Product type Paperback
Published in Feb 2015
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781784398569
Length 206 pages
Edition 1st Edition
Tools
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Toc

Table of Contents (12) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Meeting the Arduino Family 2. The Arduino Development Environment FREE CHAPTER 3. Interacting with the Environment the Digital Way 4. Controlling Outputs Softly with Analog Outputs 5. Sensing the Real World through Digital Inputs 6. Analog Inputs to Feel Between All and Nothing 7. Managing the Time Domain 8. Communicating with Others 9. Dealing with Interrupts 10. Arduino in a Real Case – Greenhouse Control 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...

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