electret again

Ok, i've looked all through this board, and I see that this topic comes up fairly frequently. But i can't seem to find an answer that makes any sense to me. I got this http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8669 and am getting nowhere. if i wire it straight to arduino analog pin (vcc is to 5v and gnd to gnd, of course), i get a constant reading of 892. no matter what. i tried putting a variable resistor in the circuit to control sensitivity. the variable resistor will then change from 0 to 892 manually. but the mic still does nothing. clapping, etc. nothing. read to try a capacitor, so i put a 4.7 uf (that's what i had around), and the numbers slowly slowly went down to about 115, and then magically started going back up. still nothing from the mic. any ideas?? please help, i'm stumped.

oh, my code, btw

int micVal;
int pin= 1;

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
  micVal= analogRead(pin);
  
 Serial.println(micVal);
 
 delay(100);
}

Do you have a multimeter? Maybe you try measuring the voltage directly. If you had access to an oscilloscope, it'd be even better. Maybe something's bad on the breakout.

ok, yes, something was wrong there. i wired up a different one and it's getting readings now. the conundrum now is how to make them useful. they seem to hang out around 500. if i yell into the mic, they oscillate from 0 to 1023. i'm assuming this is because the waveform are going up and down, and 500 would be about the average. any ideas on this? how would you write code to constrain this to positives and make it useful as output for leds or RGB color?

Well, "math" is part of your nickname, but (abs(sample-512) * 255 / 1023) strikes me as a good way to start...