At Hack A Day: Capacitance Measurement with the Arduino Uno. “as it turns out you can actually measure capacitance using your Arduino Uno, with no external components, and only ~20 lines of code.” The reference is to Jonathan Nethercott’s simple capacitance meter at PIC Tutorials.
The concept is simple: use a capacitive voltage divider with the test capacitor and circuit stray capacitance as the values. The primary issue is that of calibration and that involves measurement evaluation based on circuit interactions that include the rather low input impedance of the ADC used to measure voltage.
The code for this is very simple (i.e. short) so it can be easily understood and even ported to other microcontrollers. It needs no additional components other than a base shield. That makes it a good starter project to see what a simple microcontroller can do to be useful,
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