25 Jul
2010
25 Jul
'10
1:30 p.m.
On 7/25/10 2:03 PM, Tony Duell wrote:
Absolutely (as far as I know). Somebody mentioned the FTDI chips that
essentially give you GPIO-like bit-level parallel I/O from a USB port,
you could probably use something like that -- with the appropriate driver
software o nthe hsot -- totalk to any device that was designed to plug
into a PC printer port.
Yes, this would be pretty easy to do. Using the (free) libraries to
talk to these chips, it's not hard to bit-bang pretty much any protocol.
Tomorrow for work, I'll be using one to frob an SPI-interfaced AC power
metering chip, to explore its capabilities a bit before I design a
circuit around it.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
[USB dongles] work *remarkably* well with even old
printers [...]
but not any other parallel-port device, AFAIK.
But there's nothing inherent in the USB spec that prevents this as a
possibility, its simply the kind of USB dongle that people have built
to date, right?