About Parallel Port The Parallel Port is the easiest way to control devices outside the PC, like

LED s, lights and even home appliances. In fact the idea behind parallel port is rea lly simple. It is an 8-bit parallel interface, so we have eight bits available t here. Simple put, since each data bit can be set as either 0 (turned off) or 1 (turned on), we can directly turn on or off up to eight devices. Parallel Port has mainly 3 modes of operation :1. SPP - Standard Parallel Port (Discussed in this article). 2. EPP - Enhanced Parallel Port (Not discussed in this article).For more in fo on EPP click here. 3. ECP - Extended Capabilities Port (Not discussed in this article).For mor e info on ECP click here. How it looks? On the PC the parallel port uses a 25-pin connector (called DB-25, 25-pin D-sub or 25-pin D-shell), as you can see in figure shown below.

Pin Configuration The Parallel Port actually has 32 pins. 8 - Data Pins (shown in yellow) 8 - Control Pins (shown in red) 8 - Status Pins (shown in blue) 8 - Ground Pins (shown in green) But only 25 pins were required to run a printer through it, so rest of the pins (not shown in above picture) were not made available outside the mother board. So, we have in total 25 pins. 8 - Data Pins 4 - Control Pins 5 - Status Pins 8 - Ground Pins Data Pins Data pins are used to send 8-bits of data. Pins 2 to 9 are data pins or we can c all them as an 8-bit data bus (D0 D7). This data bus carries 8-bit data at any i nstant of time as shown below.

The type of data it carries is in digital form, i.e. either 0 or 1. 0 means OFF or 0 volts. 1 means ON or 5 volts. For example, if pin 2 is carrying 0, then it will give 0 volts at output. And if i t is carrying 1, then it will give 5 volts at its output. Similarly we get output as 0 volts or 5 volts from other data pins. Now a question arises, how can we send data? Answer to this is pretty simple. Every port on our computer has got some unique hexadecimal address. Parallel Port also has got a specific address. Generally th is address is 0x378H. To find out the address of the parallel port on your computer follow the steps w ritten below:1. Open Device Manager. 2. Go to Ports (COM & LPT) item in it. 3. Double click ECP Printer Port (LPT1). 4. A new window will pop up. 5. In that window click Resources tab. 6. Now see the I/O Range. Mine is 0378037F. 7. Here 0378 is the starting address of the Parallel Port. <!--[endif]-->

<!--[if !supportLists]-->Now we can send data using software programs (discussed later) to this address. Now we know where to send data, but what data we have to send? We have to send 0 or 1 to each pin (D0-D7) simultaneously. Each Data Pin has been assigned a bit value as shown below. Here, D7 is the most significant bit and D0 is the least significant bit. This means, if we send any data say 16 , then 1 will be sent to D4 and 0 to rest of th e pins. Similarly 255 will send 1 to each pin. We can also view it like this: Binary representation of 16 is 00010000. Binary representation of 255 is 11111111.