If necessity is the mother of invention, being cheap must be like a step-father or uncle or something?
I needed some level shifters / line drivers that I could easily use on the breadboard for microcontroller projects. Rather than give some other entrepreneur $10 for their version, I made my own.
Nothing particularly special here, aside from the cool factor added by the two LEDs which light on RX/TX events. The chip is a standard MAX232 clone, and I’ve got five 1uF ceramic caps mounted on the back side. The leds are driven by some SOT-23 transistors. To make things simple, I stuck the pin header through the board the “wrong way” and forced the pins almost all the way through their plastic spacer / retainer. This way the unit plugs right into the breadboard, and lays there real nice, even with a heavy serial cable attached.
So far so good, it works well with my bootloader at 115kbps, so I figure that’s good enough!
EDIT: Eagle SCH and BRD files available here (7-zip format).
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Looks neat!
You realize you’re overdoing it though :)
Rhaikh
June 7th, 2006
Although its a rather simple circuit, would you be so kind as to post the schematics/gerbers you used? A friend and I are going to try out the toaster-over board fabrication method and these seems like a great starter board!
I’ve been learning to design boards recently, so it would be a big help.
Ryan
July 6th, 2006
Ryan … I’ve added a zip of the eagle sch and brd files… I don’t think I used any custom libraries in this project, but it if complains, let me know!
justDIY
July 6th, 2006