Reading from Sensors: Using analogRead
Table of contents
Up until now, we’ve only controlled the flow of power to our components. We’ve used digitalWrite to turn power on and off to a pin and analogWrite to perform PWM operations and modulate the power to our components to simulate a lower voltage when fading LEDs.
Remember that sensors transform physical properties of the world into electricity. This means that we need a way to find out how much voltage is being given off by a sensor to find out what it is they are sensing. In order words, we don’t want to write to them, we want to be able to read from them
Thankfully, microcontrollers and Arduino let us do just this.
analogRead is the method that let’s us read the voltage being sent to a pin. To use this method we need to use the analog pins on our Particle microcontroller. They’re labelled from A0 to A5 on side of the board.
When we connect a sensor to the analog pins, we can use the analogRead read method to see how much voltage is passing to the pin. The analogRead will then return us an integer value between 0 and 4095 (4096 increments) which tells us what the sensor is sensing!
A little different from Arduino
If you’ve used Arduino before, this looks a little different. In Arduino microcontrollers, the range is between 0 and 1023 (1024 increments). If you use Arduino examples make sure to account for this!
Imagine you have a sensor, let’s say a light sensor. We’ll put it on analog pin A0. This is roughly what we need to do:
int lightSensorPin = A0; // connected to analog pin 0
void setup()
{
// We don’t need to do anything here.
}
void loop()
{
int val = analogRead(lightSensorPin); // read from the sensor
}
If things are really bright, we’d expect the value we get to be really high - nearer 4095
If things are really dim, we’d expect a low value - 100 or less.
Note on Analog Pins
You can use the analog pins for outputs too, e.g. to control LEDs. You can still use digitalWrite on any analog pin from A0 to A5 to control an LED. You just need to say that the pin is being used for digitalWrite actions in the setup with pinMode()
Note on pinMode()
You might have expected to see pinMode called to set the pin to INPUT in the setup. We don’t need to do this for pins being used with analogRead. For two reasons:
-
when
analogRead()is called is sets the analog pin for input automatically. -
pinMode()is used to configure digital pins, and isn’t used for analog pins