Forget the Arduino and Pi, use your old PC!

oh I need new lights at first I wasn't sure how to start off this video because I realize I talk a lot in my videos maybe that's necessary at times to explain a technical detail for example but in this video I think we can jump straight into it suffice to say if you have an old computer lying around with a parallel port you could have one of these in disguise now it should be obvious that this bigger brother did a lot of computational stuff before this was even popular with a simple USB with some software on it we can boot off this jump right into the software and start controlling something straight from the i/o ports from the parallel port now I couldn't find a button to connect to this motherboard so I'm going to have to turn on this motherboard with the screwdriver wait that's not how that work so all you will need is Rufus and the latest version of quick basic so that will be in the description below you open up Rufus you should get a window like this make sure that your USB Drive is selected and make sure that free dose is selected and you're ready to go so once Rufus is done you can go into your USB Drive you should see these files and then open up your quick basic folder go into it and just copy all of these folders straight into the USB Drive and you're done now you can insert your USB and boot into free dose and load quick basic once you're booted up you can navigate the file systems with dir short for directory and CD short for change directory navigate to the bin folder and once there simply type qbx and you will load up the quick basic development environment now to start using that program to control actual things you first need to make a sacrifice to the parallel port gods out of everything that has to be done to make this work this is the hardest and longest thing you will be doing just because you need to prepare the wires and find the ones you need the wires we are looking for are the eight data lines in the parallel port that would be pins two through nine as listed on the cable itself I use this simple set up with my multimeter on its continuity setting I connect it to one of the pins via a breadboard wire and then check all the exposed wires on the other end until my multimeter beeps now that we got our eight data lines assembled we can control something with them as an example I've prepared eight LEDs to start off with [Music] [Music] so we have the positive sides of the LEDs connected over to the data lines now for the negative side we just have to connect all of these leads in parallel and connect that to this negative shielding cable that we twisted together [Music] all right so how this works is you select an output then you select an address 8 8 8 corresponds to the parallel port we are using and then you choose a number from 0 to 255 that number changes how the LEDs light up also 255 relates to those 8 data lines so I'm going to start off with 0 that turns off all of them then I'm going to start off with one that turns on the first one then 2 4 8 16 32 64 which doesn't light up because I think that data line is broken or something I checked the LED LED works fine the cable cable is fine so the connection is there but I guess something on the motherboard is broken so that doesn't light up and then the last one 128 lights up the last one there you go those are your eight data pins and consequently 8 data LEDs if you are having problems with this setup it would be a good idea to check your BIOS settings just in case you can often customize parallel port configurations in there this is where it gets interesting with some simple coding you can make these 8 LEDs count and so now what that program does is account all the way up from 0 to 255 and each time it counts per second you can see that visually this is a computer in real time counting to 255 [Music] other than counting it can do other things like beep do you want more beeps no problem do you want it to play a soothing song for you no problem [Music] you can also adjust the frequency and duration of the sounds you produce turning you into an instant DJ [Music] [Music] wait for the drop wait for it [Music] you might be wondering if this can control a stepper motor and yes yes it can but my code is inefficient and that's why it's going so slow to control a stepper motor you need to do a few things I had to wire these six wires into a four wire configuration then I'm using the l-29 eight and motor controller and hooking that up to the four data lines I then did some coding to bind specific keys to any of the four outputs I tested those keys figured out the correct sequence those keys needed to be pressed in to rotate the stepper in a single direction and wrote more code around that information to control the stepper since it's going a little slow maybe we can try changing the delay so instead of a one-second delay we can have a tenth of a second delay actually that's just me holding down a button qbasic doesn't like decimals for some reason so how else are we going to change the delay we can't use decimals wait a minute [Music] well maybe you'll wake up the baby or have the dogs start barking at you but at least you'll have a motor turning right if you're more of a graphics guy or gal there is a lot of options you can even program your own games from scratch these are more advanced coding wise but I'll give you guys some useful links I used when coding so whether it be motors graphics or bits of data cue basic and the parallel port have a lot to offer to educate someone about electronics while everyone recommends microcontrollers you can gain a deeper understanding by programming this route as the software is basic and intuitive enough for beginners and also holds a lot of interesting options for advanced users if you like this video let me know by giving it a thumbs up and I'll see you in the next one great now how do I turn this thing off

Channel: SciCynical Inventing

Views: 372,515

Keywords: parallel port, qbasic, microcontroller, scicyncial, sir spunk, electronics, stepper motor, quickbasic, pc, computer

Id: 7D-JES4BnTw

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 26 2018