Electronic – arduino – the purpose of a voltage divider in a flex sensor

By your values, I have to assume that you are measuring off of the 10kOhm resistor on the bottom. I would hazard a guess that your 10kOhm resistor is a little high and the 100kOhm resistor is a little low. This would mean if your 10kOhm resistor is taking more of the voltage in the voltage division than expected.

There are a few problems at work here.

1. The first is the resistor value error. Ohm's Law: V=I*R. So if there is 5% error in R, then for a constant I, there will be a %5 error in the expected value of V. The %error from resistor tolerances are the maximum +/- error. So in reality, there could be a resistor with +5% error and other with -5% error. So there is a much larger possible range in output voltages for a constant current.

   • This can be eliminated by either hard-coding the real resistances in software or adding a reference voltage that is more accurate than the resistor or A/D quantization error. This reference voltage would be used to get the real resistance values as the A/D sees them.

2. A/Ds can have an offset error. This really has to be calibrated out. Some A/Ds have this built in.

3. A/Ds also have quantization error. So if a voltage falls between two consecutive quantization levels, it will have to be rounded to one of those two, introducing error. There are ways of increasing the number of bits for an A/D by oversampling and averaging blocks of samples into one sample.

There are other errors that could be at work, but those three are the main ones I have run into. If the A/D is fairly linear, then measuring two accurate voltages with the A/D circuitry would let you build an affine linear equation to correct the data. This builds off of the problems in 1 and 2.

A/Ds can appear linear, but end up being very nonlinear at a particular range. I have heard of some implementations using a look-up table to correct the nonlinear behavior. But that is getting a little beyond your current problems.

Edit: One more item. It is a good idea to buffer your analog signals to the A/D. It does a few things, like add another device to protect the microcontroller, and limit any possible transient sampling behavior from the A/D go into the analog signal.

According to the product details, the output impedance is 100kΩ, so 100Ω would almost completely short the signal.
To get 1.2V from 3V, you need a ratio of 1.2 / 3 = 0.4

Assuming a steady 100kΩ output impedance, you will need a single 66.6kΩ resistor from the sensors output to ground to divide the range down as necessary:

3V * (66.6 / 166.6) = 1.2V

Looking at the xBee datasheet, the ADC input impedance is only 10kΩ, so an signal impedance of ~40kΩ (which is what you would have with the above) is not ideal, and you may lose accuracy.

Ideally, the best thing would probably be to use an simple non-inverting opamp placed in between this and the xBee ADC input to buffer the signal.