I recall the experience of building my first robot. There I was with a RIM 850, an 8051 micro-controller and a toy tank. I had learned to program blackberries during a summer internship, 8051 assembly during a course, and had some knowledge of basic electronics. I new I could control actuators via an H-bridge with the GPIO pins of the 8051 but didn’t know how to interface the RIM 850 with the micro-controller. At that point I perused the Blackberry Hardware Developer’s manual and realized that the gold plated connector at the bottom contained the signals for serial communications. Unfortunately, my 8051 provided TTL levels instead of RS232. This was a road block.

Fortunately, as I was drinking some water near an electronics lab, I overhead a classmate discussing the same issue with a professor. When my classmate walked out of the lab into the hall way, I stopped him and told him I was interested in converting RS232 levels to TTL. He relayed what the professor had told him and introduced me to Maxim’s RS232 transceivers.

A simple question turned into full-blown discussion where we exchanged our ideas, solutions, and feed back. I can’t imagine what will happen while I’m at Maker Faire, but I encourage everyone to ask us questions about BUG and other related topics; as I know I will be asking other Makers many similar questions.