Analog MEMS Microphone Breakout - SPH8878LR5H-1 Hookup Guide

Contributors: El Duderino, jenfoxbot

Hardware Assembly

Now that we're familiar with the microphone breakout, let's connect it to a microcontroller and monitor some sound!

Microphone Breakout Connections

For a permanent connection, we recommend soldering three wires (or headers) to the PTHs on the breakout. We opted for soldering wires to the PTH connectors for a quick permanent connection to the breakout. For a temporary connection during prototyping, you can use IC hooks like these.

We recommend using the following colors of wire to easily distinguish the signals but you can always select a different color if you prefer (or do not have the colors used available).

• Red for VCC
• Black for GND
• Yellow (or some other color not Red or Black) for AUD

Note: You can use any connection as explained above to connect. If you decide to solder straight header pins, we recommend inserting the straight header pin's tail from the top of the board so that the audio input for the microphone is facing away from a surface. However, depending on your application, you can also insert the pins on the side as well. For a low profile application, you will want to use right angle header pins.

Straight header pins being soldered to MEMS microphone.	Right angle header pins being soldered to MEMS microphone.

Connecting to a Microcontroller

Next up we'll connect the breakout to a microcontroller we can use to monitor the audio signal output. For this tutorial, we used a SparkFun RedBoard Qwiic. Make the following connections between the breakout and RedBoard Qwiic (or whichever microcontroller you choose):

The completed circuit should look something like the photo below:

Read on to the next section for Arduino example code to monitor sound volume with the microphone breakout.