On Saturday 16 December 2006 10:24, Mr CW wrote: > Thank you for the pointers. It sounds like reading data back from the > parallel port is not a common thing to do, although I thought parallel port > projects might have done this. Then I realized that most PIC programmers, > parallel port displays, etc. usually only receive data, not send it back to > the computer...
It is pretty easy to read data in a GPIO kind of fashion - you can set the data direction (PCD) to input and then use PPIGDATA. However for what you want the each byte of the data stream is marked by a STROBE pulse and AFAIK there isn't a preexisting way to handle this. > I'm still looking into this, so any other suggestions are very welcome. If it was me I'd use a microcontroller (eg AVR) to turn the parallel data into a serial stream and read it in to a PC's serial port. However we already make PCBs and write microcontroller code at work.. Actually maybe something like this would do what you want http://www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?SKU=232SPS2 I think then you could just plug it into the FreeBSD box and log the stuff coming from the serial port. -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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