Help me out! - Parallel Port

[Pati]

Hi guys.

I have a PCI I/O card in my computer, containing 2 serials and 1 parallel port.

I have enabled both in panel control (System -> Hardware) and also added a driver, which allows the software to have access tothe port.

However, nothing is working ):
When I ask to set a pin, nothing happens...
When I ask to clear it, nothing happens (again)...


Does anyone have another hint to me?
I don't know how I could solve the problem..

 

[ericgibbs]

hi,
Look at my Blog link: https://www.electro-tech-online.com/blogs/ericgibbs/122-pc-parallel-port-using-vb5.html

Are you using Windows XP.?

 

[Pati]

Exactly, windows xp.


And I could not download the .zip file. It's crashed!

 

[ericgibbs]

Exactly, windows xp.


And I could not download the .zip file. It's crashed!

hi,
I just tried a test download and un zip, it works OK.

Do you have the dllport.dll in your Windows/System folder, its required for XP.

 

[trennonix]

Hi,
I remember reading somewhere that a USB to Parallel port converter will only give you control over serial and not over each and every single pin. I don't know if this is also the case with PCI but it could be.
You can also try inpout32.dll , i've used it a couple of times, once with vb.net and an another time with C#.
Anyways, good luck.

 

[MikeMl]

Hi,
I remember reading somewhere that a USB to Parallel port converter will only give you control over serial and not over each and every single pin. I don't know if this is also the case with PCI but it could be.
You can also try inpout32.dll , i've used it a couple of times, once with vb.net and an another time with C#.
Anyways, good luck.

I have used inpout32.dll with VB for years on various computers. I recently had an occasion to scan my entire hard drive for Viruses using AVAST, and lo and behold, it flagged every instance of inpout32.dll as a Trojan. Anybody else seen this? Is this a "false positive"?

 

[trennonix]

Never seen it before

 

[Pati]

no changes...

I forgot to tell you that my parallel port is not on-board... It's a pcb that I purchased and installed.

 

[ericgibbs]

no changes...

I forgot to tell you that my parallel port is not on-board... It's a pcb that I purchased and installed.

hi,
Has this PCB worked OK with any other external device.?

Have you set the Parallel port address jumpers on this added parallel PCB.??

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

In my experience of PCI parallel ports they have been entirely non-standard, and I never managed to make them work via direct access - which is why WinPicProg only supports the three standard addresses.

PCI ports which claim to use the standard addresses usually lie about it and actually use the software driver to spoof the address, which of course direct access bypasses.

 

[MrAl]

Hi there,


I have had some bad luck with PCI "parallel ports" too (note i put 'parallel ports' in quotes, because that's apparently not what they are anymore with the PCI card).
What happened was with my older Motherboard i could use my PP scanner just fine, but when i swapped out the MoBo with a new one recently it did not have a PP, so i had to buy a PCI card to do this, or so i thought.
The card did work as a PP, but it could not get up to the speed needed for the flat bed scanner so taking a scan higher in resolution than about 150dpi would take several minutes just for one scan instead of about 30 seconds.
I ended up buying a new scanner.

 

[trennonix]

So, apparently all off-board parallel ports are rubbish, what you should do is interface a micro controller to the serial port (which are fine off-board) and use the micro's pins for I/O.

If you don't have access to micros and you just need to output one or two bits you can use the DTR and RTS pins from the serial port.

code in C#:

serialPort.DtrEnable = true;
serialPort.RtsEnable = true;

in C# you don't even need any external DLL files