> What you're talking about does not make any sense. an ADC measures 
> voltage. ADC's do not have sensors connected to them. 
>

Sorry, I probably have not phrased my use-case clearly enough...

I'm connecting sensors to the ADCs. These sensors change their resistance 
when sensing something. So I want to measure the voltage over the sensors 
using the ADCs. 

The sensors need 5V power to operate, but provide separate pins for 
measuring their resistance. On Arduino I was simply using the 5V rail to 
power the sensor and feeding the measurement pins, which obviously wouldn't 
be such a good idea on the BBB (as the OP has nicely demonstrated ;) ).

A resistor-based voltage divider seemed a bit wasteful to me since quite 
some power goes straight into heat just for the sensors. Hence the idea to 
use a switching DC-DC converter for the measurement circuit. 
 

> ADCs can use op-amps ( I suppose ) to scale input voltages to except-able 
> levels for a given ADC.
>

Yes and I was wondering how to achieve this, especially how to scale _down_ 
a voltage using an op-amp, i.e. from 5 V to 1.8 V, since this is what's 
required for the OP's problem if I'm not mistaken. So far my understanding 
of an op-amp was that it could scale voltage up (hence the amp part of it's 
name). But as I said, I'm keen to learn and any pointers to suitable 
sources of information are greatly appreciated. 

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