Beginning Arduino Programming

Mapping Values

Once we see what kinds of values our analog sensor can give us, we can then decide what to do with those numbers. Sometimes we might want to drive a PWM pin using the analog input and so will need to change from a 10-bit value to an 8-bit one. Maybe instead of receiving values that we think we should get, like 0 to 1023, we get something more like 12 for the lowest number and 861 for the highest. It's even possible that although we have all these numbers, all we want to do are a few simple things depending on certain thresholds being reached. To make these unwieldy numbers more manageable, we can use several Arduino functions to map the values we get to the values that we want. Let's keep the photocell wired up and look at these ...