[time-nuts] Tbolt temperature Control & ad-hoc IO from Windows.

[John Miles]

> I have used MarshallSoft's serial IO library (WSC at
> http://www.marshallsoft.com/ not free, but very good value and stable)
> with both "Real" and USB<>RS232.  You can't tell the difference for most
> purposes, but avoid Belkin adapters.  They seem to have some
> "interesting omissions" in some of their USB drivers!  FTDI seem to be
> about the best chipsets to use, and the documentation is excellent from
> FTDI's website.
> http://www.ftdichip.com/

FTDI is the way to go, IMHO.  Parallel ports were great back in the day, but
even the I/O access code probably won't work on your next PC.  On my desktop
machine, they don't even pretend to associate the LPT port with its
traditional ports.  It's useful only with OS printer support.

> Oh yes..  Also, since Win2k SP3 (I think) MS disabled by default any low
> level (DOS mode) access to the COM ports.  There is a registry tweak
> that can re-enable such things but I've lost sight of it, as when we got
> hit by that at work, I bit the bullet and learnt how to program in
> Windows with Delphi, and re-wrote many of our tools and utilities
> (originally written for DOS in QuickBasic) for Windows.  It was painful,
> but well worth it in the long term.

http://www.beyondlogic.org/porttalk/porttalk.htm will work fine, as far as
allowing your Windows app to bit-bang the ports goes.  But Bill only knows
what it would take to get it working under Vista, and, again, the trend is
away from legacy LPT-port compatibility at the hardware level.

> Don't let MS's latest bloatware OS's put you off from experimenting with
> IO on modern PC's.

Well, in principle, I/O protection is one of those security features that MS
would be roundly mocked for lacking, if they hadn't implemented it by now.

-- john, KE5FX