title: Reading raw audio values from ADC chip on raspberry pi
body: <p>I wired up the MCP3008 ADC chip to an Electret Microphone and to my pi. I'm reading the input using bit-banging in python, and I'm getting an integer from 0-1024.</p>
  
  <p>I followed this tutorial to do the bit-banging: <a href="https://learn.adafruit.com/reading-a-analog-in-and-controlling-audio-volume-with-the-raspberry-pi/connecting-the-cobbler-to-a-mcp3008" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://learn.adafruit.com/reading-a-analog-in-and-controlling-audio-volume-with-the-raspberry-pi/connecting-the-cobbler-to-a-mcp3008</a></p>
  
  <p>My question is how do I take this integer and convert it to something meaningful? Can I somehow write these bytes to a file in python to get the raw audio data that Audacity can play? Right now when I try to write the values they just show up as the integer instead of binary. I'm really new to python, and I've found this link for converting the raw data, but I'm having trouble generating the raw data first:<a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/956720/python-open-raw-audio-data-file">Python open raw audio data file</a></p>
  
  <p>I'm not even sure what these values represent, are they PCM data that I have to do math with related to time?</p>