The Raspberry Pi has become a firm favorite in our community for its variety of GPIOs and other interfaces, as well as its economical computing power. regrettably though despite those lots of pins, there is a glaring omission in its interfacing capabilities. It lacks an analogue-to-digital converter, so analog inputs have to rely on an expansion card either on those GPIOs or through the USB port.
Most people remain content with basic ADCs such as Microchip’s MCP3008, or maybe a USB sound card for low frequency moving targets. but not [Kelu124], he’s set his sights on something much faster. The original Pi is reputed to be capable of managing a 10Msamples/s ADC, so he thinks its faster successors must be able to work much faster. To that end, he’s created an ADC pHAT which he thinks must be good for twice that figure.
The choice of silicon is a CA3306E, a 6-bit device that’s rated at 15Msamples/S. It’s something of a dated device as is shown by its DIP package, and a quick look through major vendors shows it to be no longer available. happily though, when you look at his GitHub repo it emerges that he’s also producing a board based on the ADC08200, so his software is targetable at other chips.
Whether or not you need your Pi to serve as video digitizer or high-speed instrument, it’s beneficial and interesting to take a look at a board like this one in action. We often don’t use the raw power of our single board computers, and this project proves that must we ever need to, we can.
If ADCs interest you, take a look at [Bil Herd]’s series on delta-sigma ADCs.
Thanks [Fustini] for the tip.
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