Introduction

These are my notes about a project where I want to find some cheap cheezeball piece of hardware with a network hookup and a 25 pin parallel port and be able to put my own software in the middle so I can connect the parallel port to whatever I want.

Network to parallel print server boxes used to be all the rage, and are probably in truckloads heading to landfills these days. The trick would be finding one I could reverse engineer on and hack software into.

Another scheme would be to find a linux friendly USB to parallel dongle that will read the 8 bits from the parallel port (I am expecting to find that many of these will be write only except for the control bits, but I could be wrong). Apparently some linux flavors see a USB device as a /dev/tty/USBx serial device, which doesn't sound unreasonable (where x is 0, 1, or ...).

Here are some random links:

• Linux print server
• Parallel Port Central