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).