Communicate with Parallel Port

[Craptastic]

Hello All,

Heading down the path of building an LMCE box. Lots of reading, lots of really great stuff. Excellent work.

In all my reading, and searching, I have not been able to find a reference as to whether or not the parallel port is available under LMCE.

I would like to build an interface board to control other objects and use the parallel port to talk to the hardware.

Thanks in advance.

[colinjones]

I don't believe so (parallel ports are getting more and more dated by the year, most mobos don't even have them!) The most complete and feature-full interface is serial through GSD. But there's no reason you can't use ethernet, or adapt USB. Fact is, almost all Home Theatre and Home Automation is controlled via serial, USB or I/R - really isn't much call for parallel. 'spose you could use a serial to parallel converter... The industry is going that way because you can't communicate as high speed through parallel as through serial due to timing/propagation issues and as serial speeds increase this will only get worse...

[hari]

hehe, i used parallel ports in the past to drive relays and leds :-) Now I don't even have a LPT port any more..

[seth]

I can verify that the parallel port works in 710rc2. I have an hp laser printer hooked up to it on an MD in the basement, and use it for a cups server to share to other systems in the house.

And I can attest, this is an older board on this MD, but my new core board, ASUS M3A78-EM does not hav a parallel port, but that is hooked up to a USB printer, and its CUPS server.

So it will work, but I have not used it for anything other than a printer.

Regards,

Seth

[Zaerc]

Depending on what you're planning, you might want to check out something like the sanguino as an alternative.

[tschak909]

Basically, any device that you want to deal with,

you will want to read the DCE programmers guide, and specifcially, creating a new DCE device in the wiki.

Besides IR control, there are two other types of drivers:

* C++ drivers,
* GSD devices coded in Ruby.

So you create a new device template that specifies:

* What the device is
* any packages the device might need to function
* the device data that is associated with a device (such things as serial port, status fields, etc.)
* commands the device should implement.
* events the device should be able to fire. (responding to events is done with event interceptors, of which typically only plugins do this)
* any information that the plug and play subsystem can use to automatically detect the device (this is hard for parallel port devices.)
* any related devices that will be needed
* any screens that the device must use. (typically not used)

once you've done this, depending on the driver type, you then implement the needed code inside each method, and then LinuxMCE can use the device.

-Thom