Partfinder Friday! MCP3008.

The Raspberry Pi doesn’t come with ADCs, so we picked out this simple DIP ADC chip – its super handy for whenever you need to add another 8 channels of analog input, and it runs at 3 or 5V logic/power. We found the interface trivial for any controller where you can bitbang a few bits of digital I/O.

Read more.

How-to: Use analog Inputs for Raspberry Pi using the MCP3008

Teaching the Raspberry Pi how to read analog inputs is easier than you think! The Pi does not include a hardware analog to digital converter, but a external ADC (such as the MCP3008) can be used along with some bit banged SPI code in python to read external analog devies. Here is a short list of some analog inputs that could be used with this setup.

Read more & this goes great with our MCP3008 – 8-Channel 10-Bit ADC With SPI Interface.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi.