parallel port

[esbenarndt]

Hi
Do anyone has an idea if there is a board available to make a parallel port from the GPIO pins ?
I want to use the Pi to control a board for stepper-motors running my up coming CNC machine?

Esben

[skidoobond]

Do you need to emulate a parallel port because that part of your motor controller already exists? If so, I don't know of a board that exists. If not, there are other designs that can be used directly with the RPi. You only need the RPi to make 6 outputs for a 3 axis cnc. This is easily done straight from the GPIO.

[Gomez]

There are cables that go Parallel Serial to USB .. I don't know if that is helpful but it might be:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/12-Mbps-USB-to- ... 1e93d307b3

[vtpi]

No you can't just use a usb to parallel cable for controlling stepper motors. Basically because the timing isn't right at the board level -- you need a real time operating system, etc.

However there are PIs doing CNC now by running a user interface to control Grbl on an Arduino board. The Pi is freed from the need to do real time operations -- it just basically sends commands and receives status information via USB from the Arduino that is doing the actual stepper signal generation. The Pi runs the CNC user interface.

Do a search and you'll find those projects.

One source of Pi CNC UI programs is zapmaker

http://zapmaker.org/raspberry-pi/runnin ... pberry-pi/

Also my own project here:

http://madmodder.net/index.php/topic,10312.0.html