Wire (I2C)

Pull-up resistors (I2C)

The I2C bus must have pull-up resistors, one on the SDA line and one on the SCL line. They're typically 4.7K or 10K ohm, but should be in the range of 2K to 10K.

Many of the breakout boards you can buy at Adafruit or SparkFun already have the pull-up resistors on them, typically 10K but sometimes 4.7K. If you buy a bare chip that's a sensor, it typically won't have a built-in pull-up resistors so you'll need to add the external resistors.

On the Photon and Electron, a 40K weak pull-up is added on SDA/SCL (D0/D1) when in I2C mode, but this is not sufficient for most purposes and you should add external pull-up resistors.

On the P1, there are 2.1K hardware pull-up resistors inside the P1 module. You should not add external pull-ups on the P1.

On Gen 3 devices (Argon, Boron, B-Series SoM, Tracker SoM), a 13K pull-up is added on I2C interfaces. This will sometimes work, but is still too large of a pull-up to be reliable so you should add external pull-ups as well.