100 motors controlled off a paralell or IDE port

[alltroid]

This probably sounds like a odd use of a parallel or IDE port, but I was wondering it would be possible to have a grid of simple electric motors that are controlled threw a parallel or IDE port. Basically like how thousands of pixels are lit up threw a VGA cable witch has a limited number of pins.

I'm not sure if I need some kind of driver board or micro controllers or what. I don't know if there is some clever way of using a few pins to control a hundred motors without any extra drivers, etc.

basically my idea was to pinpoint each motor on the grid but that would require a ton of wires, but what I don't understand is how a LCD monitor for example can do this, I know it has a driver board, but if you look at the cables going out of the driver board and into the actual LCD panel, there is only a few not nearly enough for each pixel.

I'm planning on using a python module called PyParallel to interface with the parallel port.

I also just realized I cant use a IDE cable, at least not with python that I know of. However if I were to use a IDE cable, I was planning on using a old external hard drive case, the kind that still used a IDE ribbon cable, witch then plugs into the computer via USB.

Also i'm assuming with that I need some sort of protection between the motors and the parallel port?


thanks

 

[Los Frijoles]

The parallel port alone will not supply enough current for motors. You will need to use a microcontroller or something to interface to the parallel port and then talk to your 100 motors. If it were me designing this I would design a module that runs on an I2C bus and allows you to set a PWM for a motor. The modules would hook into the parallel port interface using the I2C bus. Each motor would get its own address on the bus and you could use the parallel port interface to write commands to set the speeds on the motors and such over the bus. Each module could have its own power supply. The total pins per motor on this would be 4: Vcc, ground, I2C data (SDA), and I2C clock (SCL). The microcontroller would need to have 8-10 or so pins for the parallel port and 2 pins for the I2C bus. You would need to make sure that you calculate the power supply size and wire size to be able to power 100 motors at the same time.

LCD monitors actually do have tons of wires. They are extremely thin and on the back of the screen. There is a driver for the LCD that translates it to the appropriate bus type (LVDS or something).