Designing Embedded Systems with PIC Microcontrollers

CHAPTER 11 Data acquisition and manipulation

In the early chapters of this book we limited ourselves to a world that is almost entirely digital. While we want to benefit from the advantages that digital signals can offer us, we need to recognise that most real variables are analog in nature. They are continuously variable and can take an infinite range of different values, whether we are talking about temperature, sound level, frequency or other variables. It is necessary, therefore, for the microcontroller to be able to read values that are analog and if necessary generate output values that are analog, even though internally the microcontroller is relentlessly a digital device. The process of converting an analog signal to digital, along ...