22 Jan
2007
22 Jan
'07
5:54 p.m.
On 22 Jan 2007 at 5:22, Jules Richardson wrote:
Unfortunately a PC parallel port doesn't quite
have enough I/O lines, I
wouldn't have a clue how to make a USB solution (ick!), and building an ISA
card (say) would require kernel drivers (and all the complexity involved
there). One possibility is just to use two parallel ports, but that severely
limits the portability of the device - although I'm getting to the point where
that's preferable to not having any solution at all.
...or you can use one of the commodity data acquisition boards for a
PC. Plenty of I/O lines and simple enough to program from MS-
DOS/Windows 9x (lmits you to a file size of 4GB, but that should be
enough for older drives). I've got a PCI model here that uses 3 8255
PPI's (please, I know they're far from perfect) that cost about $60.
The ISA version of the card is even cheaper.
Cheers,
Chuck