Analogue and Digital

Digital data can only have distinct values.

Examples

  • the status of a light switch - it can only be 'on' or 'off'
  • the number of cars passing a point in a road.
  • the number of people attending a football match

Analogue data can vary continuously within a range of values.

Examples:

  • the temperature in a greenhouse - it can be any numerical value.
  • a person's height
  • sound frequencies

A computer is a digital device and so it can only process digital data. If an analogue signal is sent to a computer, it would have to be converted to a digital signal first. What does this conversion? ...yes! it is done by an analogue-digital converter.

Most often found in control systems
Examples :  

[1] A computer could be monitoring the temperature of a manufacturing process. The temperature arrives as analogue data and must be converted to digital before the computer can process it.

[2] A speech recognition system would use microphones to input the sound, but the analogue sound data would need to be converted to digital data before the computer could process it.

 


An analogue watch - the hands of the watch can be in any position.
A digital watch. The time displayed can only be distinct values.