Control.com - Nerds in Control

Hi,

My name is Mario Maciel (Industrial Electrician). I have a task at work that is consuming me literally. I'm an Industrial Electrician but I love electronics.

Project: I need to transfer BCD data to PC through the parallel port and generate Excel reports. This project is about a rotaring machine that has 24 brackets that need to be perfectly aligned to for a circle when it rotates at high speed with a minimum of misalignment. Any problem would cause lots of damage to the machine.

I have a sensor that detects the brackets for 9 ms time each, after the inspection time I need to collect the BCD value of 6 LED digits and deliver it to the PC to be stored for the reports. I have to do this in 30 mc, which is before the next bracket is inspected. I have used the CD4518 dual BCD counters and 4511 LED decoders. The next step is to use the parallel port of my laptop to read this 6 digit value.

Please help... Any advice will be appreciated.

Thanks.

Use Google to search for "parallel port read". There are lots of examples and explanations available.

The problem with doing it this way is that you will have to multiplex the data into the parallel port because there are too many digits. I don't know what instrument you are using, but it would be better if you could get direct access to the signal instead of tapping the display drivers.