As you can understand from the title, this article is a short manual about assembling of the device which allows making the connection between your uart device and a PC by COM port.

I’ve assembled my converter at the simplest schematic: two wires from the RS-232 port and two wires to uC – it is enough for my needs. Here is a beautiful picture with this schematic (I got it from http://sodoityourself.com/max232-serial-level-converter/):

I’ve made PCB in Altium Designer:

There is a small bug at this PCB: I had footprint only for the male connector and when I tried to remake it, I made a mistake – right signals not on 2, 3, 5 pins, but on 1, 3, 4.

Here is a 3d version of PCB, just for fun 

Now, time for a test. Just shorts TX and RX and type and terminal any symbol: if the device works properly, you see this symbol at the terminal immediately, like that: