[Swansea Hackspace] An old PC with parallel printer port?

[Justin Mitchell]

On Tue, 2014-09-16 at 09:39 +0100, Ceri Clatworthy wrote:

> But I will try to order a USB to Printer port cable,

They are of no use, they are designed only to talk to well behaved
devices using the defined protocols, you cant bit bang (waggle
individual lines) with any kind of speed or accuracy.

An interesting alternative suggestion is that if the existing controller
board is of the really dumb type, with just step and direction inputs,
then it may be possible to use a standard arduino and firmware and wire
up the parallel connector as if it was a bunch of stepsticks.

I just dont know enough about the mills hardware to speculate further