Serial to Parallel Port Converter

Before you proceed with the blog I want to make sure that its exactly not the serial to parallel port converter so that you can connect your parallel port printer or device to serial port through it and it will work. It is more or less useful for certain simple Input/Output application with computer. During one of my robotics project I wanted to control stepper motor through the computer. The idea was that I will wright a program which will run and will send that data to the stepper motor driver through parallel port. Well its very simple you just need a driver IC which will take TLL input from the parallel port and will drive stepper motor. But wait I have laptop with no parallel port and the I was using MATLAB for programming. So I searched USB-to-Parallel port converter and I got it. I bought it for just Rs.200 and was very happy. I came to my room and attached it to my computer and here comes the role of vista which has no support to the old win98 driver shift with the device. I searched lot in internet and somehow managed to install the driver properly. I started matlab hoping that matlab will recognized it as parallel port but later I found out that matlab has no support to add-on parallel ports so the idea totally failed. Infact MATLAB no more support parallel port. I switched to serial port, again I bought USB-to-parallel port converter and it worked fine with MATLAB.

After Installing it I found out the in order to interface it I need a microcontroller which has USART like atmega16 and you need to program your micro-controller so that in can communicate it with computer. Well now I know how to program micro-controller and code has to be written in the computer side. But I gave a second thought and realize that there is another and simple way also for this you don't need any micro-controller at all. Most of the part is done at the coding side and I have written function that you can directly use. So here we go

Check List-
1) Serial Port or USB-to-serial Port converter.
2) Matlab installed
4)


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