Electronic – Fully differential amplifier – adder

You cannot just connect the probe across inputs to the inamp and expect good results.

Operational amplifiers need a path to ground from each input. So the second circuit is better.

the 741 is totally unsuitable, but the LMC6041 in the notes should work well for this circuit. (2 fA is typical rating though, use the guaranteed value of 4 pA for design unless you want your circuit to only mostly work... 4pA through 300Mohm sensor is 1.6mV offset.)

LMC6041 will be happy with a single supply, so if the -5V supply is inconvenient have a look at this circuit: What is the purpose of this op amp?

I suggest you stop simulating and actually build the circuit. LMC6041 is $2 from a distributor or ask National, they'll give free samples for school projects. You don't need to hook up the ADC yet, just get the probe and signal conditioning amplifier working. Read the output with a voltmeter. Just like software, breaking the problem into small pieces is the way to make progress.

One potential issue I see with this approach is that since the inputs of the op amp will not remain at a fixed voltage, some of the voltage seen on the "sum" inputs of your circuit will be "visible" on the all of the inputs (sum and difference alike). If those inputs are not being driven by low-impedance sources, that could pose a problem.

A better design in some cases, if you have the power-supply margin to accommodate it, may be to have the summing inputs feed into one amplifier wired as an inverter (with a non-inverting input that sits at a fixed voltage), and have the output of that inverter fed as one of the inputs to the amplifier that accepts all the difference inputs. If your sum and difference inputs are intended to be grouped as differential pairs this approach won't be great (the non-inverting inputs will flow through two op amps while the inverting inputs only flow through one) but your original approach won't be either. Your best approach in that case would be to either pass all the sum inputs into one inverting amp, all the difference inputs into another amp, and then take the difference of the two outputs, or else to pass each differential pair through its own instrumentation amp and sum the results. Using a separate instrumentation for each pair would give the by far the best CMRR, but would of course require more amplifiers.