In this section we look at interfacing with the analogue world using real-time software techniques. You will use a simple potentiometer to generate analogue voltages, and measure that voltage using an Analogue to Digital Converter (ADC) to perform sampling. This leads to a topic known as digital signal processing (DSP) where the assumption made is that signal conversion is performed on strict time intervals
Analogue conversion is such a fundamental real-time task that it has justified its own dedicated section on the course.
Analogue signals suffer problems with noise and uncertainty. Analogue filters are used to prevent a phenomena known as aliasing when sampling a signal. For simple threshold detection, hysteresis is introduced to manage signal noise and avoid output jitter.