Beginning Arduino Programming

Analog Serial Monitor

So far, we have made the general assumption that the readings we are receiving from the analog input pins are providing a range of values from 0 to 1023, but this  is rarely the case, as you can see in our opening project's source code. The reason for this is that every sensor is a little different and will provide a varying range of voltages depending on what they are sensing. In order to better understand the range of values that a particular sensor is providing, we need to create a sketch to give us some visual representation of the values reported by the ADC. Before getting to that, let's back up again and look at a simpler analog sensor, as shown in Figures 6-5 and 6-6.

Figure 6-5. Photocell schematic

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