With many peripherals understanding a 5V digital input and the Raspberry Pi Zero operating at 3.3V, you might require a voltage shift from the output of the Raspberry Pi GPIO to an external device. While there are a few ways to accomplish this, the use of a voltage translator will ensure the fastest and most error-free communication. While a voltage divider works great most of the time, the slew rate can cause dirty signal reads, and voltage dividers can only be used for inputs. By having a voltage translator in our toolkit, we expand our ability for the Raspberry Pi Zero to communicate with anything that uses 3.3V or 5V inputs or outputs.
For this recipe, I used a breakout board from Adafruit, the 4-channel I2C-safe Bi-directional Logic Level Converter (https://www.adafruit.com/products/757). There are other logic translators available, but this one will work with 5V I2C devices, which are commonly used with microcontrollers such...