Our brand new office PCs didn’t have serial or parallel port in them. USB is great for normal people, but we NEED serial and parallel ports to do our work. We then have to buy extra hardware to add serial ports via USB. Which is getting more and more expensive and less and less reliable.
For example, we bought a PCI parallel and serial port adapter which looked promising enough. Unfortunately it refused to budge. After much scratching of chins, and a lot of poking around, ranging from loading userspace drivers on Windows, to installing Debian and trying to access the port from there; we found that the chip on the board was faulty. Similar problems lie with almost all converters that are available in the market, or so I’ve heard.
We had to actually “make” a serial port by pulling lines directly from a header on the motherboard.
So we banged up a simple RS-232 programmer that uses the serial port to program an AVR. Simple and minimal, it uses only a MAX232, a transistor and diode, and a couple of resistors thrown in for good measure. Estimated price, under Rs. 100. See the pic below. (All the soldering is credited to Qaiser Hussain who is amazing with an iron).
More details, including schematics and programming instructions coming soon :)
hey zohair, this is cool. looking forward for schematics and other info