Continue to Site

Welcome to EDAboard.com

Welcome to our site! EDAboard.com is an international Electronics Discussion Forum focused on EDA software, circuits, schematics, books, theory, papers, asic, pld, 8051, DSP, Network, RF, Analog Design, PCB, Service Manuals... and a whole lot more! To participate you need to register. Registration is free. Click here to register now.

how to interface parallel port using USB-parallel converter

Status
Not open for further replies.

elrayes

Full Member level 5
Joined
Jun 3, 2008
Messages
244
Helped
20
Reputation
40
Reaction score
7
Trophy points
1,298
Location
Egypt/Canada
Activity points
2,777
usb to parallel port converter driver

Hi all
Actually I've searching for about three months till now about how to interface a parallel port using USB to parallel converter cause most of laptops and new PC's don't have the legacy standard IBM PC parallel port, so i tried to use the USB to parallel converter but:
it appeared to me in the device manager as a "USB printing support" not LPT port.
Also it is not accessible.
I read on many websites and forms it is impossible to interface parallel port using USB to parallel converter cause the parallel port use low level access while USB not, however many people interfaced a serial COM port using USB to serial converter successfully.
if anyone have answers please reply, i think there are many want to know this problem.
 

low level usb parallel

however many people interfaced a serial COM port using USB to serial converter successfully
So, how is this observation related to your question? Basically, an USB-to-serial adapter is providing a high-level (Windows API) access to the COM port, as the USB printer adapter also does.

Apart from high level access, some devices (FTDI chips) allow also a simple, documented low level access to adapter pins, suitable for programming adapters and similar, but incompatible to LPT adapters, unfortunately.

As discussed in another thread, some USB-to-LPT chips have hardware features, that would allow the emulation of LPT registers and operate e.g. a bit-banging programming adapter. Unfortunately no suitable driver seems to exist yet.
 

low level programming lpt usb converter

I read about the FTDI chips, they are great, but I wonder how a parallel printer can understand and interact data from USB converter but we can't interface it, the issue seems to be very easy, some discussed to write a device driver to build an interface with USB-parallel converter.
for the USB to serial, many drivers for such converters emulate a real COM port and many developers used it to interface their MCU and other hardware projects, which mean that we have a low level access here.
I'm seeking to find a solution for such issue.
Thanks for your reply.
 

Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Welcome to EDABoard.com

Sponsor

Back
Top