I was thinking about doing a very simple project that could be useful,
and was hoping someone here could give me pointers. I know very little
about EE and this ought to be an easy first step.

I want to make a simple 2 LED strip/box I can put next to my monitor
that displays red or green depending on a program being run.

I know you can get 5v from the i/o pins on the parallel ports, so
thought if I ran a cable to the LED strip, I could write a program
that turns 1 pin on for each LED. Then I could write a program that
toggles it.

Other than wiring the LED light directly to the line from the i/o pin
does this cause problems or unsafe? Also thought, in order to keep the
line on, the program would have to send a constant stream over the
parallel port, and being at the bottom of the bus figured that would
cause my system to slow down.

Is there a circuit or basic electronic piece that can toggle yes/no?
So my LED strip could have a small battery for it's own power, and
then if I turn the i/o pin on, the circuit knows enough to keep the
LED on via it's own power source?

Know this might sounds kinda of silly, but I have some programs I run
and thought something simple like this would be a nice way of visually
telling if the program is done or not.

Like create a bash script
#/usr/bash
ton #toggle on LED
./runprogram
toff #toggle off LED

Guess down the road I could use a PIC and a small LCD display to give
diagnostic info, but that's a bit above my reach right now. Have to
crawl before you can walk :)

Any pointers?

-Josh
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