So I built Lee Hart's slick little 1802 Membership Card and its Front Panel card. Next I wanted to load some programs onto it! There was that nice DB-25 connector all ready to connect to my PC's parallel port. However... I've got a Mac, and haven't seen a computer parallel port in perhaps a decade.
My solution to this problem was to create my own interface hardware based on an Arduino. I considered using a Spark Core to allow doing things wirelessly via WiFi, but decided that for this purpose the Arduino was something more people were likely to have, and it was just a somewhat simpler solution.
The final design uses an Arduino, a 16-line I2C port expander chip, and some software. The software consists of the Arduino program and a Python program that runs on my Mac. Since it's Python, it should also run on a Windows system, a Linux box, etc. You can also forego the Python side of things and directly control the Arduino loader from a terminal, or from your own software if you prefer.
- Download or clone this repo
- Build the hardware
- Program the Arduio