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Unconditional Satisfaction GuaranteeNo Shipping Fees Above 302 Months to Decide. Returns Simplified.If you want to interface with telco, retro, or industrial equipment, you’ll probably run into RS-232 interfaces.The Adafruit RS232 Full-Pinout Breakout with 8Channels of UART to RS-232 Level Shiftersis your friend in such cases. It gives you 5 input and 3 outputchannels of level shifting and takes care of the high/negative voltage generation all in a low-cost breakout board.We use the trustyMAX3243from TI, a classic chip part of the MAX232 lineage, so you know it will work great for all your RS-232 needs, up to 250Kbps.
We also stock the DE-9 Female version.
RS-232 is what we had before USB: a 9- or 25-pin D-Sub connector that allowed data plus flow control lines. Many folks may remember these interfaces were used for mice, modems, barcode scanners, teletypes, and more.We still find devices sold with RS-232 ports, althoughmany folks use a USB to RS-232 adapterthese days.
This version has a DE9-M ‘male’ pin connector soldered in, take a look at the pictures to make sure this matches the device or cable you want to connect to!
If you want to use a microcontroller or microcomputer to chat with an RS-232, then thankfully, all you need is a serial port / UART (something just about any microcontroller has) and a level shifter. The level shifter is required because while most UARTs are 0-3.3V or 0-5V logic level, RS-232 requires +-6 to +-10V, yep the signal voltage goes negative! That means a specialized shifter is required to generate extra high and low voltages and safely convert the logic levels.
Sure you could buy a rawMAX232 chipand wire up the necessary capacitors, but this board does it all for you and even comes with a DE-9 connector for plugging in directly into your ‘client’ device. It can run on 3.3V power and logic, which many older chips can’t do. It also can do all 8 data pins, so you can use all of the flow control signals like RTS, CTS, DTR, DSR, DCD andRI.
We also include two separate lines from the MAX3243: ‘Valid’ and ‘Off’. TheValidline output will have logic level high when the chip detects signal voltages from the device it’s plugged into. So you can use it as a ‘connection made’ signal. There’s also theOffpin, which when set to logic high by the microcontroller will tri-state all the pins for power reduction.
This breakout comes fully assembled with a UART side for low-voltage power/logic level, and a DE-9M RS-232 side for high-voltage signals. We also include some headers so you can solder to a breadboard in a few minutes.
