Assembly and Wiring

by Bill Earl

Assembly:

The board comes with all surface-mount parts pre-soldered.  For breadboard use, the included header-strip should be soldered on:

Prepare the header strip

Cut the supplied header strip to length and insert it long-pins-down in your breadboard to hold it for soldering.

Position the breakout board

Place the breakout board on the header pins.

Solder!

Solder each pin for a good electrical connection.

Wiring:

Power

First connect VDD and GND.  These boards will work with either a 3.3v or a 5v supply.  The diagram below shows connection to the Arduino 5v pin.
The absolute maximum analog input voltage is VDD + 0.3v. To avoid damage to the chip, do not attempt to measure voltages greater than VDD.
sensors_ADC_Power_bb-1024.jpg

I2C Connections

I2C requires just 2 pins to communicate.  These can be shared with other I2C devices.  For R3 and later Arduinos (including MEGA and DUE models), connect SDA->SDA and SCL->SCL.
sensors_ADC_i2c_bb-1024.jpg

I2C "Classic"

For older Arduino boards without dedicated SDA and SCL pins, connect as shown below.  (For older Arduino Megas, SDA and SCL are on pins 20 and 21)
sensors_ADC_Classic_i2c_bb-1024.jpg

I2C Addressing

The ADS11x5 chips have a base 7-bit I2C address of 0x48 (1001000) and a clever addressing scheme that allows four different addresses using just one address pin (named ADR for ADdRess). To program the address, connect the address pin as follows:
  • 0x48 (1001000) ADR -> GND
  • 0x49 (1001001) ADR -> VDD
  • 0x4A (1001010) ADR -> SDA
  • 0x4B (1001011) ADR -> SCL
The following diagram shows one board addressed as 0x48:
sensors_ADC_Address_0_bb-1024.jpg

Multiple Boards

By assigning each board a different address, up to 4 boards can be connected as below:
sensors_FourBoards_bb-1024.jpg
OVERVIEW Signal Connections
This guide was first published on Nov 29, 2012. It was last updated on Nov 29, 2012. This page (Assembly and Wiring) was last updated on Nov 13, 2019.