A Straightforward Old-Fashioned DAC

December 11, 2022 by Jenny List 32 Comments

With modern microcontrollers, the process of interfacing with the analogue world is easy. Simply enable the on-board DAC or ADC, and talk to the world. If you’ve ever done this with a slightly older microprocessor, you might have encountered the DAC and ADC as chips in their own right, but how about the earliest generation of microprocessors? In those days, if an analogue component was needed, the circuit which would later be integrated on chip would have to be made from scratch. So it is that [Florian Wilhelm Dirnberger] has built a very old-style 6-bit DAC, using a circuit that would have been familiar back in the early 1970s.

At its heart are a pair of 4007 triple CMOS inverters, which form the six bits driving a resistor ladder DAC. This is simply a chair of R… 2R resistors, relying on Ohm’s law for its operation. Each successive bit contributes twice the current to the output of its predecessor, and the 4007 simply provides a buffered supply for the bits.

It’s the simplest of DACs, if not the most capable. Back in the day a typical ADC might also use this circuit, feeding a comparator alongside the input voltage. The microprocessor would count through the digital values until the comparator output bit flipped, at which point it would take the counter value as the analogue measure. You may never need to build one when your microcontroller has one built in, but it’s useful to know how simple DACs and ADCs work.

If the subject interests you, we’ve had a look at DACs including resistor ladders used in audio.

The LPT DAC

September 29, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 40 Comments

About 30 years ago, before every computer had CD quality audio built in, audio cards and chips were technological marvels. MIDI chips, FM synthesis, and synths on a chip reigned supreme but one little device – just a handful of resistors – sounded fantastic. it was the Covox Speech Thing, a simple resistor ladder wired up to the parallel port of a computer that would output 8-bit audio to an external amplifier. [FK] recently built his own Covox (Czech, Google translatrix) with just 18 resistors, and the results sound fantastic.

Instead of fancy chips, the original Covox Speech Thing used the 8 bit parallel port on a PC. Back in the olden days, this was the fastest way to get digital data out of a computer, but since it was digital only, a DAC was required to turn this into audio. A simple resistor ladder was sufficient, and this hardware was eventually supported by the old DOS games from Sierra and Id.

[FK] has a demo of this LPT DAC available here, but we’re not thinking that link will last long. If anyone has a better link, leave a note in the comments and we’ll update this post. Thanks [beavel] for sending this in.

R2R Ladder Connects Multiple Buttons To One ADC Pin

March 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

If you’ve run out of I/O pins on a project and need a way to add user input you can find a slew of port expanders that work with various communications protocols like I2C and 1-Wire. But if you just want to add in some buttons without reaching for an extra IC you’ll love this hack. [John Boxall] shows how to add four buttons using one ADC pin.

The concept is nothing new. The buttons make up an R2R resistive ladder. When one of them is pressed, it completes the circuit for a voltage divider. The results are measured by the analog-to-digital converter of an IC to tell which button was pressed. The difficult part is calculating the resistor values. [John] is using eight resistors made up of just two different values. Every button and every combination of buttons has a unique voltage result which can be discerned by the chip. He even made a truth table so you don’t have to.

The example circuit seen in the video after the break uses an Arduino. But this concept is directly applicable to any microcontroller. And it should be quite easy to use an ADC interrupt to drive all of the button-read events. Continue reading “R2R Ladder Connects Multiple Buttons To One ADC Pin” →

Your First Digital To Analog Converter Build

February 17, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

Have you ever built a Digital to Analog Converter before? This is a circuit that can take the 0 or 5V coming off of several digital logic pins, combine them together, and spit out one analog voltage that represents that value. If you’ve never made one, here’s your chance. [Collin Cunningham] over at Make put together another lab video about DACs which we’ve embedded after the break.

The circuit above uses an R-2R resistor network – often called a resistor ladder – which you can learn much more about from the reference page that [Collin] links to. Although a DAC in an IC package is by far the most commonly found application, we do see these R-2R networks in audio hacks from time to time.

Continue reading “Your First Digital To Analog Converter Build” →

Resistive Ladder Volume Control

January 10, 2009 by Eliot 26 Comments

preamp

[jefffolly] published some straight forward plans for a passive volume control. It uses a resistive ladder built across the contacts of 12W rotary switches. Each resistor provides a 5dB difference, and he recommends using 0.1% tolerance resistors to maintain accuracy. The use of discrete resistors instead of volume pots means that the output is much more predictable. All of the RCA sockets were connected using oxygen-free copper wire.