At times I feel short of digital pins on the Arduino to handle multiple button inputs. Here is an easy way to use 1 analog pin to handle many input buttons. The way it works is very straightforward: use a resistor network as voltage dividers, and then let each button feed a different voltage to the analog pin. Thus by detecting the voltage we can tell which button has been pressed.

Schematic:

Download the corresponding Arduino sketch code.

As a downside, it cannot handle simultaneous button presses. To do that, one could potentially use resistors at doubly increasing resistance (1K, 2K, 4K, 8K…). Hence by checking the detected voltage, we should be able to tell which buttons are pressed simultaneously.