Question

I am looking for ideas on how to translate one range values to another in Python. I am working on hardware project and am reading data from a sensor that can return a range of values, I am then using that data to drive an actuator that requires a different range of values.

For example lets say that the sensor returns values in the range 1 to 512, and the actuator is driven by values in the range 5 to 10. I would like a function that I can pass a value and the two ranges and get back the value mapped to the second range. If such a function was named translate it could be used like this:

sensor_value = 256
actuator_value = translate(sensor_value, 1, 512, 5, 10)

In this example I would expect the output actuator_value to be 7.5 since the sensor_value is in the middle of the possible input range.

Answer 1

One solution would be:

def translate(value, leftMin, leftMax, rightMin, rightMax):
    # Figure out how 'wide' each range is
    leftSpan = leftMax - leftMin
    rightSpan = rightMax - rightMin

    # Convert the left range into a 0-1 range (float)
    valueScaled = float(value - leftMin) / float(leftSpan)

    # Convert the 0-1 range into a value in the right range.
    return rightMin + (valueScaled * rightSpan)

You could possibly use algebra to make it more efficient, at the expense of readability.