Basic Serial Port Circuit

I'm pretty new to electronics but I want to learn and I'm still busy getting to the basics. I'm busy doing a project at home, but I need some kind of remote control for the pc. I was thinking of an IR remote control, but I'll maybe do that later. What I Basically want to build, is some kind of circuit with a few press buttons, this circuit is then connected to the serial port on my pc. Depending on which button you press it sends a certain signal(bit ?) to the serial port. The programming part on the pc, receiving the signal I'll prob be able to do, but the circuit is something which I don't know how to do...

Any ideas ?

Serial Comms

What you need to interface with the serial port is :-

A voltage level shifter from RS232 +/-12v to logic +5v (maybe a MAX232 chip)

A UART (universal Asynchronous Recieve/Transmit) - I would have suggestsed a 6402 for this but they have gone obsolite! I guess you now need to consider a microcontroller with an integral UART such as the PIC16CR63.

The rest is just programming.

Best tutorial I know is 'Serial Port Complete' by Jan Axelson
**broken link removed** Her site has many links.
http://www.ziplabel.com/cir/index.html The link you want.

Re: Serial Comms

mechie said:

What you need to interface with the serial port is :-

A voltage level shifter from RS232 +/-12v to logic +5v (maybe a MAX232 chip)

A UART (universal Asynchronous Recieve/Transmit) - I would have suggestsed a 6402 for this but they have gone obsolite! I guess you now need to consider a microcontroller with an integral UART such as the PIC16CR63.

The rest is just programming.

Click to expand...

Do you maybe have a circuit for that ? I'm not sure how one would do that..

Look at this page for basic idea:
**broken link removed**

If this is not what you want search for "PIC serial port" in www.google.com