## DAC

DAC stands for Digital to Analog converter, it allows to convert a number represented in memory with bits (for eg. from 0 to 1023) to a voltage level (for eg. from 0 to 5V).

PWM-DAC

A simple solution to achieve this is to use a periodic signal that goes through a low-pass filter, producing an "averaged" signal:

Thermometer DAC

Another method is the thermometer one, using a string of resistors allowing to represent all possible values. The output can then be selected using a multiplexer. This solution has a huge footprint, because all values corresponds to a physical point in the circuit.

R2R DAC

Finally, R2R ladder is a way to combine resistors to produce a voltage level using directly the bits representation:

ADC is inverse of DAC, standing for Analog to Digital Convertion. It consists in sampling a voltage level to represent it numerically in the program.

ADC design is dual to DAC ones, comparing produced voltages with the input to sample:

For example, the "flash" ADC (above) is the dual to thermometer DAC, containing all possible voltage levels.

In ATmega328P, the ADC is based on successive comparisons using values from an internal DAC:

## Timers

Time is ticked using a low-level oscillator named quartz generating a periodic signal at a given frequency.

This clock can be sped up using PLL, or sped down using dividers

### Operation

A timer is a configurable feature, where an initial clocks increments a register at a given frequency.

When this register reaches its maximum value, it will go back to 0, this is overflow

Dependeing on the timer, this maximum value can be the representation of the value (like 0xFF or 0xFFFF) or set by user to arbitrary value.

An interrupt can be used at this particular time to trigger some periodical event.

### PWM

Often, timers comes with the possibility to generate output hardware PWM.

In this case, the state of a pin can be changed each time the timer reaches 0 or a particular value: