I wanted to play with the AMS AS7341 11-channel spectral color sensor and the easiest way is to buy a breakout board making it easier to work with that tiny little 1.8V surface-mount chip. DFRobot has reasonable looking products but I ended up going with Adafruit's AS7341 board, item #4698.

Compared with DFRobot's offering, the Adafruit board has only a single LED instead of two. Neither of them brought out LDR pin for controlling external illumination. They both include all the voltage level handling necessary to allow 3.3V and 5V microcontrollers to talk to this 1.8V chip. DFRobot offered two products: one with their solderless Gravity connector system and a different offering compatible with 0.1" pitch headers. Physically, Adafruit's #4698 is slightly larger, but it has both 0.1" pitch headers and their STEMMA QT connector. These are also known as JST-SH connectors, and I've already purchased a set (*) originally intended for use with BeagleBone Blue. Having both options for connectivity down the line is appealing to me, and I've been a longtime Adafruit customer. Which meant there were other things I wanted to buy from Adafruit anyway. It was minimal additional effort and cost to add AS7341 to an order and wait for it to show up.

Once the sensor arrived (UPS required a few extra days beyond original estimated delivery) I connected it to an ATmega328P Arduino Nano on a breadboard. As is typical of Adafruit, they have developed an Arduino library to communicate with this sensor, and I could load up the led_test example sketch as a quick test to see if it worked.

Yes, it works! I will now look over Adafruit's full set of examples.

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