I am considering doing an education project using the SEN54 Particle, VOC, Humidity, and Temperature Sensor (SEN-19325), but am a little put off by the difficulty of connecting it to the Qwiic system with SF’s recommended Qwiic Boost (SPX-17238) board.
Since it looks like both of the Qwiic connectors on this board are standard connectors with 3.3V, the only way to connect the SEN54 (or any other 5V device) is by soldering pin headers, right?
Given the apparent necessity of doing that for any use of this board, I’m curious why they don’t just come pre-soldered?
For example, if the Qwiic Boost came pre-soldered with right angle male pins and the cable included with the SEN54 had female ends instead of male, the whole thing would be plug and play.
Is there an easier way of connecting all this I might be missing here?
You can directly connect the different SEN54 lines to any board, including one that is expecting a maximum 3v3 on the data lines. The SDA/ SCL lines are LVTTL and thus 3V3 compatible (see https://www.rfwireless-world.com/Termin … LVTTL.html). You will need to connect the VDD to the 5V, as the fan is working on that voltage and the SEL and GND lines to GND.
The board I was intending to use (https://www.wemos.cc/en/latest/d1/d1_mini_pro.html) doesn’t have any pin headers soldered on and I was hoping to avoid soldering (prefer to have the kids focus their time on the code). But in keeping with your suggestion, if we’re going to have to solder anyway, I might as well just have them solder headers on the controller and skip the Qwiic Boost all together.
I posted here hoping someone from SparkFun would provide some insight into their thinking when designing the Qwiic Boost, as without pre-soldered headers, I don’t see the point of this board (i.e. what function does it serve over just connecting to the controller directly).
One connector is qwiic at 3.3 volts and 3.3 volt input, the other connector and the solder pads is qwiic (i2c) at 3.3 volts along with 5 volt power output.
If you look at the schematic it makes more sense what’s going on.
I guess you could solder the headers beforehand so the students don’t have to or you could use it as a class learning experience on how to solder.
I certainly could, but I that leaves my original question – given that the point of qwiic connectors (note the play-on-words in the name) is to make things plug-n-play, what purpose is this component supposed serve?
And I’m not just trying to peeve, I am seriously curious if anyone from SparkFun can tell me what the advantage to using this component is? If I’m forced to solder anyway, why not just solder pin headers directly onto the microcontroller and save a few bucks and eliminate an extra chip that has to be stashed somewhere.
And for the record, I’m not anti soldering. Just with limited time there is always a choice between spending time soldering vs spending time coding.
You would not want to have a qwiic connector with 5v on it; this would violate the qwiic spec and make it too easy to blow up boards. As for a connector for the 5v side, there is no standard for that so Murphy would ensure that any connector they put there is the wrong one…
And I’m not just trying to peeve, I am seriously curious if anyone from SparkFun can tell me what the advantage to using this component is?
It’s a work around that allows a non standard I2C device to be used on the qwiic bus without having to build your own voltage boost circuit and 5 volt to 3.3 volt level converters. Doing that from scratch would be a lot more soldering than the 4 pin headers on the qwiic boost.
Also, you will find that since 5 volt I2C devices don’t conform to the qwiic standard, they don’t have qwiic connectors on them anyway so you’re going to end up soldering or making some sort of adapter.
