[HN Gopher] Serial to Parallel Port Converter
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Serial to Parallel Port Converter
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 22 points
Date : 2024-05-10 02:48 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bramblyhill.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bramblyhill.com)
| mmastrac wrote:
| I tried to understand from this page, but what is a Membership
| Card? Is there some context to this post?
|
| EDIT: aha, 14 years ago there's some context
| http://www.bramblyhill.com/post/2010/10/27/Membership-Card.a...
| unnouinceput wrote:
| And it's parallel to serial convertor, not what the title on HN
| says.
| afandian wrote:
| In the same vein (I think) is this Kenbak recreation. I have
| one, it's well made and recommended!
| https://adwaterandstir.com/product/nanokenbak-1/
| samcheng wrote:
| Back in the day, the parallel port was awesome for hobbyist
| hardware hacking. You could 'bit bang' and basically use the pins
| as general-purpose I/O pins.
|
| Rather than the bespoke setup described in the article, I guess
| the most-common equivalent these days is a USB connection to a
| Raspberry Pi or Arduino or similar?
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> Back in the day, the parallel port was awesome for hobbyist
| hardware hacking._
|
| Also the MIDI-game port which was basically an ADC for the PC,
| meaning you could build your own gaming racing steering wheel
| using a volume knob screwed in the middle of a CD cake case and
| pedals using volume wipers, all connected to the MIDI port with
| no extra drivers needed. Good times.
| couchand wrote:
| Curious, MIDI is a decidedly digital protocol...
| Fronzie wrote:
| ISA cards, like the soundblaster had the MIDI and joystick
| on the same connector. The joystick had up to 4 analog
| inputs, maybe that's what's meant here.
| crest wrote:
| Maybe it would be better to say it was a common enough
| interface to hook up devices that were essentially a bunch
| of potis and not much more?
| jodoherty wrote:
| FTDI also makes a lot of USB chips with software controllable
| GPIO pins:
|
| https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264
|
| https://ftdichip.com/products/ft2232h-mini-module/
|
| Bit banging on a modern OS subjects you to a lot of jitter
| though. It's not like using a parallel port in DOS where you
| just have to worry about interrupts. The preemptive scheduler
| can really mess up your timing.
|
| That said, the FT232H, FT2232H, and FT4232H have an FTDI Multi-
| Protocol Synchronous Serial Engine (MPSSE) cores that you can
| program to protocols like SPI and I2C where the high speed part
| doesn't require any smart logic to handle. It's a bit of a
| special skill though (you send MPSSE specific command bytes
| over the USB interface into the chip's command buffer and tell
| it to execute them).
|
| If you need more high speed smarts, it's also convenient to use
| a Raspberry Pi Pico with MicroPython or CircuitPython with
| Programmable I/O (Pio) with an interactive session:
|
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/what-is-pio/
|
| https://docs.micropython.org/en/latest/rp2/quickref.html#pro...
|
| But yeah, beyond that, you're better off using an Arduino or
| something and doing it all on the microcontroller.
|
| On the plus side, all of these things are relatively cheap and
| easy to obtain.
| jodoherty wrote:
| Also, while libftdi isn't hard to work with:
|
| http://developer.intra2net.com/git/?p=libftdi;a=blob;f=examp.
| ..
|
| It's dead simple to also use these FTDI devices with Python:
|
| https://eblot.github.io/pyftdi/api/index.html
| rendaw wrote:
| I wanted this for GPIO on my PC to interface with some
| hardware, but all the prebuilt USB TF232 adapters had the
| GPIO pins closed off, and AFAICT the TF232 requires flashing
| using some proprietary windows binary to get into a mode
| where the GPIO pins can be used as GPIO (since it has
| multiple modes of operation).
|
| I can't believe I'm not missing something... Is there an off
| the shelf USB GPIO device somewhere? Plug it in and start
| using the linux GPIO driver?
|
| The solution my friends gave me was "buy an arduino", flash
| the arduino, and use the arduino's gpio... which yeah, I
| could do, but is that really what it takes for a $2000
| desktop to flip a bit these days?
| sokoloff wrote:
| That (or an ESP) is a really effective, easy, and cheap
| solution, which makes it hard for a more limited and more
| expensive solution to take hold. Most everyone who wants a
| digital output is capable of following the Arduino route to
| the end.
| swatcoder wrote:
| There's little market for the product you crave. Most
| people who know what GPIO is know how to buy a $5
| microcontroller with a USB port and upload some firmware to
| convert serial commands to the pin states/transitions they
| need.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yes, this is the concept of the Firmata project.
| afavour wrote:
| I have a faint memory back in the day of using the parallel
| port to do super speedy file transfers (compared to serial at
| least). I wonder what insanely low bandwidth I was using by
| todays standards...
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > I have a faint memory back in the day of using the parallel
| port to do super speedy file transfers (compared to serial at
| least).
|
| In the mid to late 90s, I was sharing my main 486's dial-up
| connection with an old clunky laptop using PLIP:
|
| https://docs.kernel.org/networking/plip.html
|
| So my brother and I could both use Netscape at the same time,
| on two different computers. Felt like the future!
|
| P.S: actually the laptop was just running an X (back then not
| even Xorg yet) and displaying a Netscape window running on
| the main, beefier, PC. All over PLIP : )
| dheera wrote:
| The world keeps flip flopping between serial and parallel.
|
| Back in the day parallel ports were awesome because they were
| effectively 8 serial ports in parallel (sounds awesome right? 8
| times the bandwidth)
|
| But then some dude came along and USB did 100X the bandwidth in
| a serial bus. Then other dudes were like "okay great now let's
| put multiple USB data pairs in parallel" and boom USB 3.2 was
| born. Parallel again. USB-C is effectively a UPB.
|
| Parallel ATA was the shit back in the day for hard drives but
| then Serial ATA replaced it. Now we're at NVMe which is
| parallel again with 4 PCIe lanes.
| netik wrote:
| back in my day we did this with discrete TTL or CMOS shift
| registers and no PICs. they are a luxury ;)
| a1o wrote:
| 74374?
| kristianpaul wrote:
| And these days is about chips for sampling data as fast as
| posible like the Cypress 5 Gbps Peripheral Controllers.
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