Posted by Bob Sisson on December 30, 2001 at 18:02:06:
I was brave and took appart my base.
Weird to begin with.
The Parrarel port is only using 2-3 bits. I am assuming one line is ground, one line must be the "Data Ready" line so that leaves only 2 lines for data... Weird.
Ok.. the connections to the Guns..
Assuming at least 1 pin is for ground, an Xmit, a Rec, and one What ?? Maybe a "sense" pin to tell when to try to talk to the gun ??
I figure that they are using something like the stamp chip as it has plenty of I/O lines, and is pretty self contained. This would also make the I/O decing easy as they understand "RS-232" native... Once you "opne" a pin, you can write to it by something like
Send (pin 1, "Test"CRLF)
Oh well...off to play more with the test equipment.
If anyone has done any other homework on these it would be appricated if you would share...