ProtoCentral tinyADC breakout board

The ProtoCentral tinyADC breakout board is a high-precision analog-to-digital converter (ADC) breakout board that can be used to accurately measure and convert analog voltages to digital values.

Product Overview

tinyADC has a 12-bit resolution and can operate at a sample rate of 3.3 kSPS (thousands of samples per second) through an I2C interface. The board can be configured to work as either four single-end input channels or two differential channels, depending on the application. The tinyADC has Qwiic compatible connector, in addition to standard breakout headers to just plug it into any compatible board with no soldering required.

Interface Connectors

• Qwiic connectors: Both of these connectors are internally connected together and you can connect your Qwiic board to either of these
• Breakout Header: If you do not want to use Qwiic and would like to directly connect this to a breadboard, you can solder standard 2.54 mm (100 ml) pins to this header.

Address Select

• The default 7-bit I2C address for this board is 0x49 (which is what is provided in the sample code).
• By desoldering this solder jumper and connecting it to the left side, you can select 0x49 as the address.
• This is usually required if you want to chain two of these boards together to use on the same I2C bus.

Wiring the board to your Arduino or other board

If you have a Qwiic Connect System or STEMMA QT compatible board, you can just plug it in directly directly to the Qwiic/StemmaQT port. No soldering required !

If you want to wire the breakout board directly to an Arduino or compatible board without using a Qwiic connector, please follow the following table.

Programming

Prerequisites

• Download and install the Arduino IDE according to your platform. Checkout Sparkfun’s great guide about how to install the IDE.
• Using the Arduino IDE, download our ProtoCentral TLA20xx Arduino library from the Arduino Library Manager. For more information about how to install an Arduino library, checkout this great guide, again from Sparkfun.

Interfacing with Qwiic

The tinyADC has an On-board Qwiic compatible connectors to bring flexibility in interfacing. It makes prototyping easy, less complex and interfacing with I2C has been put up simple. The board has built-in support for popular qwiic sensors. This would make it more suitable to plug in, detect the sensor, upload the code and read data.

Install the Library

ProtoCentral tinyADC uses the following Arduino library:

• TLA 2022 ADC for Analog to digital conversion. We provide the Arduino library for TLA2022 to make it easier to use.

It can be found in the ‘Sketch’ menu under ‘Include Library’, ‘Manage Libraries’, and then enter the keyword ‘ProtoCentral TLA202x’ to see the library. When you click on the library, the ‘Install’ button will appear. When you click that button, the library should be installed automatically. When the installation is complete, close the Library Manager.

Running the Arduino Sketch

If you have correctly installed the libraries, the example sketches should now be available from within Arduino. Here is the setup code. This starts the TLA2022 ADC in continuous mode, sets the data rate to 128 samples per second (SPS) and the full scale voltage range to 2048 mV.

void setup() {
  delay(3000);
  Serial.begin(57600);
  Serial.println("Starting ADC...");

  Wire.begin();

  tla2022.begin();

  tla2022.setMode(TLA20XX::OP_CONTINUOUS);
  tla2022.setDR(TLA20XX::DR_128SPS);
  tla2022.setFSR(TLA20XX::FSR_2_048V);
}

In the Arduino loop function, we simply read the ADC value continuously over the USB-UART.

void loop() {
    float val = tla2022.read_adc(); // +/- 2.048 V FSR, 1 LSB = 1 mV
    Serial.println(val);

  .. Code to send data through serial port.
}