I've been looking around a bit, but ready-made solutions seem a bit, eh, pricey.
In order to recommend a way to go, it would be good to know a few things though:
- How experienced are you with a soldering iron?
- Have you experience programming microcontrollers? Do you want to?
- Do you have expendable computer hardware for at least the testing phases of the hardware?
- Do you have programming experience on the PC?
- What OS do you intend to use?
Myself, if it didn't have to be very portable, I'd go with some quick-n-dirty stuff on the parallel port. 8 output, 5 input (from the top of my head, and without dirty tricks), both for digital signal levels only. Nice programming interface from userspace with access to all the seperate pins in Linux, but you'll more or less need to do with C. But of course I have a printer interface on a separate PCI card...
You might want to take a look at epanorama, in the .net domain (no clicky, sometimes dubious ads and popups), especially the "PC Circuits" section. |
