Serial Communicaion Level Converters | RPi / BeagleBoard to Arduino / ATMegaX | UART

Working on my college project I came across the problem of interfacing a custom designed control board based on ATMega8 microcontroller to RPi that would run the main program. UART seemed to be the best option. The problem is that RPi runs its UART at 3.3V level and BeagleBoard runs its at 1.8V level and ATMegaX runs its UART at 5V level. Therefore there was a need for converter. Here are the schematics and design of the one that I built.

It is simply two transistor based inverters shifting the logic up and resistor network putting the logic down. The resistor logic is to step down the voltage for RPi. If you intend to use this for BeagleBoard then please change the resistances to appropriate values. You can download the PCB file and pdf.

Note:
We need to replace the lines  
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait
with
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait
in /boot/cmdline.txt
and comment out the line
#Spawn a getty on Raspberry Pi serial line 
T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100
to get
#Spawn a getty on Raspberry Pi serial line 
#T0:23:respawn:/sbin/getty -L ttyAMA0 115200 vt100
in /etc/inittab
In Raspberry Pi if you wish to use the port for other uses than the terminal access.
In BeagleBoard you will need to setup the pins to work as serial. Please refer to the relevant documentation
Use software like minicom to access the ports.