Capturing Parallel Port Data

[Daniel O'Connor]

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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