Hi !

On Fri, 4 Aug 2000, Chuck McManis wrote:
> Interesting ideas, I've got half a dozen LP11 interfaces (I think that is 
> the version M7897?) that are just sitting here wasted.

I love this printer port on every platform for digital I/O. A Lantronix
Printserver controls my coffee machine (alpha stadium :-), i wrote a little
program for my notebook (FreeBSD) to program serial EEPROMs for SGI machines,
if they lost the ethernet address, i have a little 8031-computer, which gets
the software through some shift registers connected to a standard parallel
port, you can at least OUTPUT anything you want through these ports. And if you
really just want to output, you have to connect pin 1 and 10 of a standard
parallel port, maybe some other pins to avoid PAPER_EMPTY signals or so, and
then you can just output your bitmasks as byte to /dev/lpt0, it just appears
on the connector as a nice 8 bit binary signal to control some drivers to
switch some relays, and there you can connect 8 machines in your kitchen :-)

...Michael

-- 
void windows() { while(status == SYS_RUNNING) { sleep(rand()); bluescreen(); }}