I apologise that this is an extremely beginner question which has no doubt been answered countless times all over the internet . I've tried searching for those answers but i'm so new that I don't even really know what i should be searching for nor how to interpret the answers.
I've been making a bit of a usb joystick with an arduino and a hall effect sensor but have ran into a bit of a brick wall. I have a really simple circuit, just gnd, vcc and the sensor output (show in attached image) but i get noise on the result (roughly +/- 10 units of the 10 bits). I've managed to get solutions working by using a software moving deadzone but this reduces the sensitivity beyond what i am aiming for.
Does anyone know if this represents a problem with the setup? Is it possible to reduce the noise without reducing the sensors sensitivity?
Decreasing noise: improve your wiring; get a better sensor; keep your electrical environment quiet; hold the joystick with less vibration; add RC filter.
Software solutions: take the average of multiple readings; add hysteresis (probably what you call "dead zone").
thank you wvmarle. i'd actually tried RC filters prior to putting this message up but hadn't gotten a useful result. As it was in your list i took another look and played around with the size of the capacitor and saw a massive improvement!! The capacitor i ended up using has the same capacitance as the one i tried first so not sure why it fixed the issue.... maybe a bad connection or something.
i'm now getting fluctuations around 1/2 with long periods of stability. i'll keep playing with it to try and get rid of the remaining noise.
thank you again, not sure i'd have gone back to it without the steer
When using an RC filter do mind that it also slows the reaction time of the signal (as it takes time to charge/discharge this cap). The bigger the cap and resistor value, the stronger the filtering and the lower the reaction time.
A fluctuation of 1-2 points is possibly the error of the ADC itself. You better use hysteresis to filter that out.
