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.
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