 The Great Search Retrovi, Lady Eda, Edward Digikey, thank you so much Digikey, for supporting The Great Search, Lady Eda, user powers of engineering, every single week just for people how they can find things. Sometimes it's stuff in the middle of a project and you're like, oh this would be a good great search. So this week is what? Okay, so this week we're working on integrating this baseball 2003, this 3D mouse thing, and it comes with a DE9, which has RS232 serial on it, and I realize that we don't have a break out in the Adafruit shop, or I don't have one, that will convert TTL serial, like from an Arduino or circuit pipeline board, whatever, into RS232. And so I thought, let's go to Digikey and see if we can find one that does that. So this is, just quickly, this is the protocol for the baseball 2003, and at the bottom I think there's even a little pinout diagram, maybe I'm confused, maybe it was another document. Sorry, so this was only the protocol, but there is a pinout, basically it's plus minus 6 volts on the data line, and so I need to convert 0 to 3 volts to negative 6 to 6, so let's go to Digikey. And so what I want is an RS232, they're called transceivers, which I always misspell, that's if I got it right, yeah, not I before E, I guess it's except after C, that's true, so it's C-E-I-V-E-R-S. And so these are chips that will convert logic level to RS232 standard, and one of the nice things about these, I've been, you know, it's one of the first chips I actually used in school, is that they'll also, not only do the level conversion for you, but they'll do the level generation for you, so you don't have to provide them with that negative plus minus 6 to 10 volts, they'll generate that for you using a switch cap converter. So let's go to an active, and then we only want transceiver, we don't want a driver receiver, we want both receiving and transmitting. Wow, there's an Apple Talk converter, Tandy. Let's go with stuff that's only in stock, and only sold by Digikey. Next question is how many drivers, receivers, so you'll see it's a transceiver, so it's always positive. You know, in general, you want two, two, so you have RX and TX, that's one set. And then you have RTS and DTR both ways, so it's four total signals. But you know, I'm okay with more, so I'll go up to four, four driver transceivers. And then, let's see, I want only surface mount because I want to be able to pick and replace this. And next up is the voltage supply, again, you know, some, there are some here you see that require you to provide it with that plus or minus 7 volts or whatever, 5 volts. I don't want to do that. I want to run this off of 3 volt logic. So I'm going to select only this and below, so only these because they will have support for 3 volt power supply and logic like on the feather wings. Okay, so lots of options here, but let's do it by, you know, price because why not. So let's put in, you know, quantity of 250 and then let's see what we've got. So the Max 3232, so originally this was called the Max 232, which is a classic transceiver. The Max 3232, I think is the 3 volt version and you can see they're not very expensive and they come in a lot of different makers, so you see TI makes a Max 3232 and so does Max Linear. They make an SB 3232, so, and there's a lot that are very similar, like you'll see the SP and then there's another Max, you know, Renaissance has an ICL 3232, so, and they're all pin compatible too. There's like 16 T-SOP and 20 SOIC, so I have a couple options, but basically anytime you see the 3232, like, you know, down here, there's one. These are good to go. So let's look at this one because this is nice and inexpensive. It's only 67 cents. We can look up the data sheet here, which I already pulled up, so this is a 3 volt to 5.5 volt multi-channel RS232 driver and receiver. So yeah, it's got, you know, these simple buffers, except there's two of each. So you get each direction, two sets. So RX and TX and then RTS and CTS, so flow control basically as well as data and then it comes in a couple of different packages, all 16, you know, pins. And then there's this charge pump built in, which is quite handy, and so they mention it, you know, you'll need to add a couple capacitors. There was one Maxim chip I remember that I really liked using in school, back when I didn't have to worry about the price of things because the lab paid for chips, and I would use the one that had the built-in capacitors and it was like, literally it would just be a dip chip and inside they had the capacitors bonded into the chip. But, you know, for surface mount, if I'm going to be pick-and-placing it, it's, you know, the chip was much more, much more expensive, it was like $5, so again, you know, I have this one chip that I would take with me from project to project because I didn't have to wire up these caps, but if you're making a product you're probably happy to put the capacitors on and they even give you a little layout here, so you see there's there's two sets of, there's actually four capacitors you need or five if you include the VCC bypass, one doubles the voltage from three to six or from five to ten, and then the other one is an inverter, you can use a switch cap as an inverter, and that gives you the negative voltage, and then the buffer is just powered by these, by these switch cap rail generators. As you can see here what it looks like, you know, there's data in and then it gets converted from these little zero to three volt lines to this plus or minus red line, but these are, you know, these are very handy. This is going to a bread and butter chip, it's in stock, you know, if this particular model isn't available there's always others, so while I had to use this particular one, I have used the 232 series and they work really really well for the job, so this is my pick for the Great Search. That's a Great Search?