If you’ve run out of I/O pins on a project and need a way to add user input you can find a slew of port expanders that work with various communications protocols like I2C and 1-Wire. But if you just want to add in some buttons without reaching for an extra IC you’ll love this hack. [John Boxall] shows how to add four buttons using one ADC pin.

The concept is nothing new. The buttons make up an R2R resistive ladder. When one of them is pressed, it completes the circuit for a voltage divider. The results are measured by the analog-to-digital converter of an IC to tell which button was pressed. The difficult part is calculating the resistor values. [John] is using eight resistors made up of just two different values. Every button and every combination of buttons has a unique voltage result which can be discerned by the chip. He even made a truth table so you don’t have to.

The example circuit seen in the video after the break uses an Arduino. But this concept is directly applicable to any microcontroller. And it should be quite easy to use an ADC interrupt to drive all of the button-read events. [Read more…]