hey
I notice a couple things from the Sipex schematic that might not be right with your circuit:
- You have no filter cap on pin 16 to ground
- your caps are huge... they say to use .1Uf or 100nF
- pins 11,12,13,14 are inputs and outputs. They shouldn't be connected to +5, so...disconnect . Maybe you will burn the chip after all.
Probably the caps: those are about 100 times larger than they should be. The MAX323 is an upgrade over the 232 as it uses smaller caps, which are cheaper for manufacturing.
D
PS: isn't electronics fun?