The Desk of Ladyada - Mailbag & Spaceball 2003!

Mr Ladyada gave me this funky 3D mouse to play with today - it has a DE-9 plus power supply cable on it, so with a little googling and pySerial hacking we were able to get button and motion data out of it. Next up, we want to design a RS-232 Featherwing to make it easy to attach to these sorts of devices and send/receive data. Even though RS-232 is kinda old at this point, we still see a lot of devices that show up with one of these 'universal' ports! We'll also check out a cute Arduino compatible we got in the mail. The Great Search - 3V TTL to RS-232 converter https://www.digikey.com/short/5jrm33hr To get this nifty Spaceball user interface working, we're using a USB to RS-232 adapter cable. But for the next step in this project we'll want to use a Feather board. In order to connect to the DE-9 port safely, we need to convert the TTL serial on a Feather (0-3V logic) to +-6~10V inverted logic. Thankfully, there are chips that make it easy - they even have built in switched-cap converters to create the +6V and -6V logic rails! Let's find one that we can use to make an adapter Featherwing with. #deskofladyada #thegreatsearch #adafruit Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------