There are two types of sensors you can connect to: digital or analog sensors. Unlike the Arduino, the Raspberry Pi does not have the native ability to read analog sensors. We need an analog-digital converter like the MCP3004 or the MCP3008 to convert our analog signals to a digital output our Raspberry Pi can understand.

In this tutorial I show you how to connect a MCP3008 (this tutorial also works for the MCP3004) to your Raspberry Pi. In the following tutorials I will show you how to write a Python 3 script to take readings from the sensors!

This tutorial is a little older (published in 2015!). The main principles are still relevant, so I haven't needed to update this lesson.