General purpose data acquisition and control via the IBM PC Centronics printer port
N. E. Murphy · Measurement Science and Technology · 1996
This paper describes a novel system for acquiring data and controlling equipment via the parallel port of an IBM PC or compatible. An inexpensive circuit and associated computer software are described which allow up to 256, eight-bit, digital input and output devices, together with eight hardware interrupt request lines, to be accessed via the Centronics parallel printer port. Programs can access the external devices via a software interrupt into a memory resident driver program. This allows all common programming languages to make use of the system. Data transfer speeds of over 40 000 reads/writes per second are achieved. .