Though if you wanted to part ways with it, you can pick up an FTDI USB serial adapter for cheap. Though if it has a parallel port, hold on it it. Parallel ports USB adapters are just printer adapters and don't work for general parallel port use.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

USB serial adapters sometimes have compatibility issues. Hardware serial ports have interrupts, while USB serial ports can only be polled at a limited rate.

There are serial and parallel PCIe cards available that work much better than the USB adapters. Some modern desktop motherboards still have a serial port, but it's usually a pin header that will need an adapter to connect to. There is also a nearly pocket sized laptop with a serial port and more connectors than many full size laptops have.

[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

PCIe can indeed be your friend! I got one with parallel port and no device to connect to. Currently looking for ideas.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 9 months ago

The parallel port used to be used for connecting all kinds of homemade devices like logic analyzers, microcontroller programmers, frame grabbers, or just used for GPIO for reading switches and controlling relays. It was a lot easier to access directly from DOS than it is from Linux or newer versions of windows though.

Of course you could just connect a printer to it. I've got a thermal receipt printer that I've been meaning to write software for eventually. It will print out whatever I cat to /dev/lp0, but I can't easily do any formatting or control the cutter that way.

[–] reboot6675@sopuli.xyz 1 points 9 months ago

Yes I was surprised too! It runs smooth and physical condition is great. The battery is dead tho haha

And I think it doesn't have a parallel port unfortunately.