> Some people here are in the process of building a small robot, and have
> decided to use a parallel port interface because the hardware's
> easier that way. The tricky part is that now they want to make it
> controllable from a Linux machine, and I think that means writing
> a parallel port device driver. I've never written a device driver
> and I barely know more than they do, so I wanted to ask:
Hmm...Why parallel? Sounds like a pain. Many good microcontrollers have
serial I/O built into them. I know most of the PIC and 68hc11 do. That
would be much simpler in terms of hardware and software. No need to write
special hardware drivers. Actually, even in parallel, if all you want to
do is send data, just dump the appropriate but streams to /dev/lpt1 or
whatever to make the robot do what you need it to do. No need for special
hardware drivers.
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Tracy Reed http://rohan.sdsu.edu/home/treed IRC-Maelcum
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