15 Jun, 2009  |  Written by Cristiano  |  under Making stuff

I have spent the Sunday afternoon working on this RS232 to TTL levels converter. Nothing exciting here, just a little tool I need to connect Microchip microcontrollers to the PC serial port, during my debugging sessions.

The circuit is very easy and available on hundreds of websites: the MAX232 chip only needs 4 1uF capacitors. I could have chosen the MAX233 instead, because it has the same functionalities of the MAX232 but it doesn’t require the external capacitors, and it would have been much easier to fit inside the little project box!