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11 year old's blog and adc question

Former Member

I'm an 11-year old girl who has been using the RPi for about 5 months.  I've used Python in VIM, IDLE, Midory, OpenELEC, Scratch, and GPIO so far.  Check out my adventures on my blog at http://raspberrypikid.wordpress.com and some of my projects in Scratch are here: http://scratch.mit.edu/krystal92586 (I think the website is down until May 9th.  I can't wait for Scratch 2.0!)

 

I bought an analog to digital converter from Adafruit, but the instructions are way too hard for me (bit banging?).  Anybody have a set of simple instructions?  I'd just like to use sound, light, temperature probes with my RPi.

 

Krystal

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  • Hey Krystal,

     

    Kudos to you! I think what you're doing is really cool.

     

    Interfacing with an analog to digital converter is not really much harder than what you have already been doing, so let's see if we can get you going.

     

    First of all, let's start by figuring out which device you bought. They all work pretty much the same way, but there are some differences. Just post a link to the product you bought.

     

    Before trying to connect light or temperature sensors, I'd recommend connecting a simple potentiometer. That way, you can get used to the ideas behind analog to digital conversion without having to think about how to work with a particular kind of sensor.

     

    So let's start with the model of AtoD you bought and take it from there.

     

    best,

     

    Derek

  • in reply to Former Member

    Thanks everyone.  It is the mcp3008 found here: http://www.adafruit.com/products/856

    I love adafruit's website, but that's where I saw the instructions that were way too hard for me.  It's the same instructions that Drew linked to.  For example, I have no idea what any of this means, "Advanced users may note that the Raspberry Pi does have a hardware SPI interface (the cobbler pins are labeled MISO/MOSI/SCLK/CE0/CE1). The hardware SPI interface is super fast but not included in all distributions. For that reason we are using a bit banged SPI implementation so the SPI pins can be any of the raspberry pi's GPIOs (assuming you update the script)."

     

    Thanks!

  • in reply to Former Member

    Krystal

    Some of the instructions are hard for me as well, but at your age learning is a lot easier.

     

    SPI is used on the PiFace Digital.

    There is some information here that may help.

    http://www.farnell.com/datasheets/1686131.pdf

     

     

    Mark

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