Be careful about trusting that ADC, it is somewhat notorious for inconsistent lower bits...summing and averaging helps, if you have the inter-sample time to do that.
Pi PICO W on batteries
Jun 14, 2026
Last reply: 3 weeks ago
22 Replies
The errors are very predictable as they are caused by certain very low value capacitors in the switched capacitor adc having incorrect values. It seems that the chip design tools did not model stray or fringing capacitances accurately enough. There is software around that can post process the adc readings to make a substantial improvement.
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Oh yes. It has noise allright. But feeding sensors from the stabilised
3.3v line helps a lot.Do I really need 12 bit accuracy to measure temperature? Not really. Nor is it a microsecond sample that I need, Ring buffers and averages are easy to implement
Onboard is fine.
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