Qwiic Shield for Arduino & Photon Hookup Guide

2017-11-02 | By SparkFun Electronics

License: See Original Project Arduino Photon

Courtesy of SparkFun

Introduction

The Qwiic Shield (for Arduino or Particle Photon) is the first step in getting acquainted with SparkFun’s Qwiic connect ecosystem. It connects the I2C bus (GND, 3.3V, SDA, and SCL) on your Arduino or Photon board to a series of SparkFun Qwiic connectors. The board already has the circuitry to convert the 5V given to the 3.3V required by I2C boards in our Qwiic ecosystem. The Arduino shield also has holes for mounting Qwiic boards. Since the Qwiic system allows for daisy chaining (as long as your devices are on different addresses) you can stack as many sensors as you’d like to create a tower of sensing power!

SparkFun Qwiic Shield for Ardunio

Qwiic Shield for Photon

Required Materials

To follow along with this hookup guide, you will need any Arduino with the R3 header footprint, or a Photon Board. This includes the Uno, RedBoard and many other Arduino compatible boards! Here are just a few of the compatible boards.

Arduino Uno - R30

SparkFun RedBoard - Programmed with Arduino

Arduino Mega 2560R3

Particle Photon (Headers)

Now you probably didn’t buy the Qwiic shield if you didn’t have any Qwiic products to use with it, right? Well, if you don’t have any Qwiic products, the following might not be a bad place to start.

SparkFun GPS Breakout - XA1110 (Qwiic)

SparkFun Environmental Combo Breakout - CCS811/BME280 (Qwiic)

Qwiic Visible Spectral Sensor - AS7262

Qwiic Adapter

Finally, you’ll need our handy Qwiic connectors to easily connect sensors to your Qwiic shield. Below are a few options.

Required Tools

You will need a soldering iron, solder, and general soldering accessories to solder the header pins to the Qwiic shield for Arduino.

Soldering Iron - 30 W (US, 110 V)

Solder Lead Free - 15 Gram Tube

Suggested Reading

If you aren’t familiar with our new Qwiic system, we recommend reading here for an overview. We would also recommend taking a look at the following tutorials if you aren’t familiar with them.

How to Solder: Through-Hole Soldering This tutorial covers everything you need to know about through-hole soldering.

Arduino Shields All things Arduino Shields. What they are and how to assemble them.

I2C An introduction to I2C, one of the main embedded communications protocols in use today.

Hardware Overview

Qwiic Shield for Arduino

The Qwiic Shield’s have 4x Qwiic connect ports, all on the same I2C bus. Logic level converters are included for the Qwiic connect port’s SDA and SCL lines so you do not have to worry about using the Qwiic system with 5 V (or 3.3 V) devices.

In addition to this, a large prototyping area is included. As shown in the image below, the Qwiic shield for Arduino has a few neat features such as a few 3-by-1 rails to help with prototyping.

Qwiic Shield for Arduino

There are also buses for ground, 5V and 3.3V on the shield for Arduino outlined below.

Shield for Arduino

The headers also allow for every pin on the microcontroller of your choice to still be accessed through the female headers.

Qwiic Shield for Photon

The Qwiic shield for the Particle Photon also has buses for 3.3V and ground. However, they are much smaller.

Qwiic Shield for the Particle Photon

Hardware Assembly

To get started with your Qwiic shield or Arduino, all you’ll need to do is solder on headers. For a detailed description of how to do this as well as more information on Arduino shields, simply check out our Arduino shield tutorial. It’ll get you going with attaching those headers to your shield properly.

Once you’ve attached headers to your Qwiic Shield for Arduino, you’re ready to plug it into your Qwiic enabled board of choice. If you need to mount a Qwiic sensor, just grab a few standoffs and screws. Plug in any Qwiic enabled board and get going!

Qwiic Shield or Arduino Solder on Headers

Resources and Going Further

For more information, check out the resources below:

Now that you have your Qwiic shield ready to go, it’s time to check out some of SparkX’s Qwiic enabled products, many of which are on their way to becoming good old fashioned SparkFun products.

Qwiic Micro OLED

Qwiic Magnetometer - MLX90393

Qwiic Mux - PCA9548Z

Qwiic Water-Resistant OLED

But I Already Have Sensors!

If you already have a handful of SparkFun sensors and parts? SparkFun has been putting our standard GND/VCC/SDA/SCL pinout on all our I2C boards for many years. This makes it possible to attach a Qwiic Adapter that will get your SparkFun I2C sensor or actuator onto the Qwiic system.

Here is the list of the boards that have the standard I2C pinout and will work with the Qwiic adapter board: