Analog-to-digital converter

Hey kiddo! Do you remember when we learned about how you can turn the sound of your voice into a digital wave so you can save it on your computer? Well, there is a special device that helps with that called an analog-to-digital converter or ADC for short.

Let's imagine we have a drawing of a hill. The top of the hill is the loudest sound and the bottom is silence (no sound). In order to save the sound onto a computer, we need to turn the hill into a graph so the computer can understand it.

The ADC takes the drawing of the hill (analog signal) and turns it into a graph of dots (digital signal). It does this by measuring the hill at different spots and recording the height of the hill at each spot. It plots these heights as dots on the graph.

Now we have all these little dots on the graph that represent the sound. These dots can be saved and used to recreate the sound whenever we want. The ADC helped us turn the analog sound into a digital signal that the computer can understand and save.