I bought 5 of this MAX232ACPE from China on eBay for my Max 8085 Project. 3 of 5 was getting very hot and "have burned" somehow.
I took an old TI MAX232N and anything was fine. -- Kind regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen ExPLIT IT Solutions Pawel Radomychelski -----Original Message----- From: Stephen Adolph <[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: [M100] Fake MAX3232 RS-232 transceivers from China / Ebay Date: Wed, 19 May 2021 07:34:21 -0400 As you know I tend to tinker with hardware a lot. Well I certainly have been schooled on the downside of cheap ebay parts. I'm working on a project to make Newdos (aka TS-DOS) more tolerant of network latency. After all, we have good solutions now possible for direct serial over wifi, so what we need is a TS-DOS that can chat over real IP networks. To conduct some experiments and observe what is going on, I've made 2 RS-232 inline devices. RS-232<----> MAX2323 <---> MAX3232 <---> RS-232 One is simply a repeater; It sits on an RS-232 link and has 2 back-to back MAX3232 transceivers such that I can easily see the signals represented as 3V logic (compatible with my logic analyser). RS-232<----> MAX2323 <---|-----|-> MAX3232 <---> RS-232 | | MAX3232 | | M100 The second device is the same repeater that also includes a connection on one data line to an in-line M100. This allows the M100 to be a "man in the middle" and buffer up/ delay the RS-232 characters in one direction. This simulates wide-area network latency. The "delay" program is attached. Anyhow, a lot of MAX3232. Well I bought 10 of what I thought were actual MAX3232 from ebay. Example here: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/273089898048?hash=item3f956d2640:g:PBkAAOSw03lY42ZH Well, my projects were being frustrated by what I thought were defective boards.. in fact... read this --> https://blog.heypete.com/2016/09/11/investigating-fake-max3232-ttl-to-rs-232-chips/ What a hassle. Long story short - ST3232 is a reasonably priced pin compatible replacement for MAX3232 that you can get at digikey. Cost me 25$ to get 10 parts, but ... I would have had several hours back in my life had I avoided the ebay supply route. Just goes to show you gotta be careful!
