At 10:03 AM 8/10/2006, Alberto I2PHD wrote:
>Please excuse me for this OT request, but I think that in this group there 
>are a few who have played with the USB to
>Parallel converters, generally in form of a cable (with some chips in the 
>connector shell).
>
>Are they good for a printer exclusively, or can I drive the single pins of 
>the parallel port, not only the 8 data bits,
>but e.g. the Strobe pin, the AutoFeed pin, the Initialize pin, etc. and in 
>the reverse direction, can I read the Busy
>pin, the PaperEnd pin, the Select pin, etc. ?


Not usually.. they don't show up as a i/o device...  You talk to it through 
some form of software driver, which may or may not implement all the IOCTL 
kinds of functinos.



>In other words, loading the device driver that I suppose comes with the 
>adapter, will my user program be able to do I/O
>on the 0x278, 0x279, 0x27a addresses (in case of LPT1), as when a real 
>parallel port is present ?


There are some drivers out there that "emulate" a physical I/O port 
(because the processor hardware allows a reference to a protected memory 
space to generate an interrupt, you can do this)


>If someone has direct experiences on this, I would like hear from him, 
>many thanks indeed.


I have had very poor luck using software that "talks directly to the 
hardware" with non-standard hardware implementations.  I'd try to figure 
out how to do it with standard i/o device driver calls.

I think the standard printer driver has enough smarts to do this 
(certainly, it can do the outputs, the question is reading back all of the 
status bits, or reading back data on the output bits)


>73  Alberto  I2PHD
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>FlexRadio mailing list
>[email protected]
>http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz
>Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/
>FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com

James Lux, P.E.
Spacecraft Radio Frequency Subsystems Group
Flight Communications Systems Section
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mail Stop 161-213
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena CA 91109
tel: (818)354-2075
fax: (818)393-6875  



_______________________________________________
FlexRadio mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.flex-radio.biz/mailman/listinfo/flexradio_flex-radio.biz
Archive Link: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexradio%40flex-radio.biz/
FlexRadio Homepage: http://www.flex-radio.com

Reply via email to