🔧 Elevate Your Data Game!
The ADS1015 is a state-of-the-art 12-bit ADC featuring 4 channels and a programmable gain amplifier, designed for precision and versatility in data acquisition. Updated in 2022 for STEMMA QT compatibility, it’s perfect for modern applications requiring reliable and accurate measurements.
R**K
I was able to hook it up and begin reading values pretty close to the advertised 3
Ive always been impressed with Adafruits boards. I bought this for the sole purpose of being able to capture analog measurements as fast as I could. I was able to hook it up and begin reading values pretty close to the advertised 3.3k measurements per second with a raspberry pi 3.
C**L
Five Stars
Converts voltage to digital readings. I wish I bought the 16-bit version (ADS1115), but this version suits my needs.
N**7
Excellent ADC accuracy at the expense of sampling rate vs. lower resolution ADCs.
These are really interesting ADC chips that excel at fine resolution for applications that don't require fast sampling. An excellent example is my RPi torsion balance magnetometer which only needs to be sampled at 1s/sec or so. I initially built the device using an MCP3008 and was very disappointed in the sensitivity of the magnetometer plot. I mistakenly blamed it on the mag itself at first until on a whim I decided to try one of my Adafruit ADS1115 modules that I had laying around for a rainy day. Same mag build, same location, nothing different except the ADC and all of a sudden I'm getting way more sensitivity. Then I noticed that the Y scale on the graph was still at the tiny ~200mV range that the MCP3008 was originally showing, and it all clicked in my head - there really is that much difference in resolution with a 16 bit ADC. The especially nice part is that I wasn't seeing a lot more noise to go with it - the plot is pretty pure.The downside of all this, is that naturally, the sample rate is MUCH slower. With Spidev and an RPi 3B+, I can pull off a whopping 55,000 samples per second using an MCP3008, so it's good for fast things like audio signals, my long distance lightning monitor, etc. The ADS1115 by comparison will only pull off 200 samples per second at the very most using the older Python 2.7 drivers from Adafruit. Oh, it's good enough for seeing some nice buttery smooth movement on a graph if you can ever get MatPlotLib to move that fast, but you can't expect it to catch a fast transient signal even if all you're doing is pushing data as fast as possible into a buffer list. In short, you have to choose based on what your goal is.Based on what I've seen on the magnetometer, however, this chip is more than good enough to watch passing cars bend the signal in real time with nice fluidity. I'm planning to get a couple more of these and push them into service for a seismograph experiment, where the resonant frequency is low anyway and the high resolution of the ADC can really show off on very, very tiny movements. Similar to how the torsion mag is built, I'll just use a suspended pendulum weight with a little flag hanging off of it that throws a shadow between an LED and a pair of photodiodes. A system like that can detect insanely small movements, and should produce some really interesting results.
