8 Relay Parallel Port Interface

[maca6918]

Hey Guys,
New guy here, but certainly not new to the cockpit building. Currently I'm working on a multi purpose cockpit to be used on many aircraft in FSX and one thing has been bugging me for days as I cant seem to find any information on the net about how to go about this.

I have an old 8 Relay Parallel Port Interface lying around and I was wondering if there was anyway to interface this with FSUIPC or something? I was going to use it to display the landing gear lights and didn't want to pay out for another I/O board since I had this lying around.

Any ideas? Hopefully I was clear enough on explaining what I want to do...

Cheers,
Jack

[davek]

Hi Jack and welcome
I dont know about the board but I can highly recommend buying FSUIPC. It opens up an whole new world for your cockpit.
Once you have FSUIPC installed connect up the board and see if it is recognised.
Being a relay? board is it just for output or input? You may need to write some code for it to work and interface.

[skino]

Hi Jack,
one could write a small program for the card that outputs the respective values​​. With VB is not a problem. Have done it without the card, 8 relay connected directly to LPT1. Has worked out quite well. Unfortunately, the new PC have no more LPT port and a PCI-LPT card I wanted to use. If you have a documentation of your card, I could write you a proper program. I might also adapt this program:

http://www.mycockpit.org/forums/show...ght=#post95607

[Buddym]

I agree with skino, should be ez to write a program to work with the card. If the card plugs into a parallel port and has only 8 relays then it probably is only using the data bits on the port, and writing to them will be very simple. A potential gotcha is that NT and win95 were the last windows os's to have the built-in driver for reading and writing directly to I/O ports. There are plenty of 3rd party drivers out there, many for free. for a ton of useful info on writing your own code you could have a look at Jan Axelson's book "Parallel Port Complete". It covers things like drivers, writing code in VB, C, etc.

If the card uses the standard data port bits for it's control of the relays, then the base address of the port is also the address you write to for controlling the relays. Look in the BIOS settings to determine the base address for the port.

Cheers,
Bud

[yoss]

New pci lpt and serial cards available very cheap on ebay at any quantitys


Regards
Joseph

[maca6918]

Hi Guys,
Forgot to mention I already have the registered version of FSUIPC and WIDEFS .

The 8 relay board is output only, I would imagine that each mechanical relay would be connected to each of the 8 data bits on the port? I'm sorry but I don't have much more information as I brought it a couple of years ago and lost all documentation.

I was planning on running WIDEFS Client on one of my spare computers with a parallel port and connecting the card to that...Just need some software to get it going, which is where I'm completely clueless haha.

Cheers,
Jack