On 01/01/2011 18:50, Byron Jeff wrote: > With the death of parallel ports, and to a large extent serial ports on P= Cs, > there's no out of the box interface that can be driven in software on a P= C. yes there is. It's USB, It's trivial to write program for PIC in JAL to use existing USB HID,=20 Storage or Serial Drivers. As long as you are doing data and not "bit-banging" any language/program=20 can use a virtual serial port provided by a USB interface. Then the PIC can use I2C, Serial, Parallel, PATA, ICSP and many other=20 interfaces. An 18F2550 or 18F4550 is a good one to start playing with. In fact the Pickit 2 is this using USB HID. You can use it as a logic=20 analyser, TTL serial adaptor or ICSP. You can even put your own firmware=20 on it. Quite inexpensive. --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .