I found what was going on! Instead of connecting VREF to ground as suggested, I have to put a voltage in there, like for example, 1V. Then it works fine! ( Readings are not really stable but I am working on that. However, I would really appreciatte any help if someone knows how to stabilize a reading using hardware/software ).
Thank you!
Yes, you can connect VREF to 0v (GND), 1.2v, 2.5v, or 5v depending on the offset that you want. They talk about the VREF in the video from the nerdkits website I linked in a previous post.
I'm glad you got it working and sorry I forgot to mention the offset voltage earlier.
For stabability make sure you have caps on your power source. A .1uf cap would do the trick, other than that there is a trick mentioned in the nerdkits video where they show one way of attempting to elliminate the noise in the signal by switching the polarity of the excite voltage back and forth and sample the reading for each direction and then using those two readings to cancel out the noise.
Hope that helps.
Thanks
John