Optical Serial Interface

It is sometimes necessary to install microcontrollers quite far away from data processing systems, such as in temperature measurement systems, security systems and other situations. An interference-free connection between the two parts of the system is thus an absolute ‘must’. This simple optical interface is excellent for this sort of application.The system consists of two parts: a transceiver (Figure 1) using a MAX323, which is connected to the serial bus of a PC, and an even simpler transceiver (Figure 2) at the microcontroller end.