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I'm trying to read voltage using Arduino, here's the code:

float r1 = 99700;
float r2 = 10004;
float adc, voltage;
unsigned long analog;
void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  analogReference(EXTERNAL);
  pinMode(A0, INPUT);
}

void loop() {
  for (int i = 0; i < 64; ++i) {
    analog += analogRead(A0);
    delay(1);
  }
  analog = analog / 64;
  adc = (analog * 2.441) / 1024;
  voltage = adc / (r2 / (r1 + r2));
  Serial.print(analog);
  Serial.print(", ");
  Serial.print(adc);
  Serial.print(", ");
  Serial.print(voltage);
  Serial.println(" ");
}

Had a VERY noisy reading and what I did was adding an external voltage reference (TL431) and also connected a 9V switching adapter to Arduino UNO. But I still had some noise in analog readings so as you can see in the code I'm taking 64 sample and averaging them.

After doing all those noise reduced a lot but not completely:

console

What else should one do to get an steady reading?

By taking 1024 sample noise will be removed but then I'm sacrificing performance...

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8
  • your 0.46 looks very steady :) SCNR. You might look at the sensor itself and it's wiring. Add capacitors ... – DataFiddler Oct 6 '19 at 9:19
  • @DataFiddler it looks steady in that screenshot but it's not, after all the value IS depended on the raw analogRead... – ElectronSurf Oct 6 '19 at 9:23
  • the range of analogRead is 0 to 1023. you read 190. what are the magic numbers? – Juraj Oct 6 '19 at 9:41
  • @Juraj the numbers doesn't matter i can calibrate it one way or other, what i want is an steady reading. – ElectronSurf Oct 6 '19 at 9:43
  • common ground is connected? – Juraj Oct 6 '19 at 9:46
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I solved the problem by adding 3 capacitors:

  1. 220uF on the Arduino power supply.

  2. 100uF on TL431 output.

  3. 1uF on A0 input.

I also increased the sampling rate to 128 times (and removed the delay).

Here's the result, as accurate as my multimeter:

concole

result

There's still 2mV difference in higher voltages which is because of my 2.5V reference voltage and Arduino ADC 10bit resolution (2.5 / 1024 = 0.002).

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4
  • 1
    Effectively, Serial.begin(9600); and the lots of output control speed. – DataFiddler Oct 6 '19 at 13:12
  • 1
    A/D converters are always noisy. If you dive into the specific processor's specifications you may find a 10 bit A/D converter only has, maybe, 8 bits of meaningful data. 1) Have you verified the processor is tracking the voltage as expected by changing the voltage at the A/D converter's input? 2) What are you using as a reference voltage. And, consider using exponential averaging instead of averaging a fixed group of A/D conversions. – st2000 Oct 6 '19 at 14:04
  • @st2000 yeah it shows the correct voltages with ~2mV difference, the voltage reference is TL431. i don't even know what exponential averaging is! gonna google it now. thanks. – ElectronSurf Oct 6 '19 at 14:34
  • 1
    Looks like wikipedia calls it exponential smoothing, not exponential averaging. Pick values based on powers of 2's to keep the math simple and adapt to embedded programming. – st2000 Oct 6 '19 at 14:57

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