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Serial to Parallel Port Converter
The Membership Card has a 25-pin control port that Lee intended to be used with a PC parallel port to control the Membership Card. Unfortunately, many new PCs, especially laptops, do not have a parallel port; or the PC runs Windows Vista or Windows 7, two operating systems that do not provide easy access to the parallel port for user programs.
I decided to solve the problem by creating a hardware RS-232 to Membership Card adapter that can be used by any serial port-aware application – from a simple terminal program to a purpose-build front end. I also wrote a Windows program to use the serial port to talk to the adapter, one that implements an interface familiar to anyone who has used an ELF-class computer. There is also an archive that contains the Visual Studio 2008 project file for the Membership Card Control Panel – see the notes in the documentation for important information about additional packages that you need to build the code.
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