Thanks all.
I wish Microchip would have used a couple of extra pins on the device and allowed address setting the old fashioned way.
- seems VCC & GND are valid voltages so 7 equal resistors say 1K @ 3.3V should be possible.
- trimpot just seems so sloppy, else it would be a obvious choice and cheap too.
- SPI is great & fast but I2C makes it easy to add more slave devices e.g. relay / opto boards, RTCC & EEPROM without adding a CS or CE line for each peripheral. I am open to suggestions though...