psychopy.parallel - functions for interacting with the parallel port

This module provides read/write access to the parallel port on a PC.

This is a wrapper around Dincer Aydin’s winioport for reading and writing to the parallel port, but adds the following additional functions for convenience.

On windows winioport requires the PortIO driver to be installed.

An alternative (e.g. on Linux) might be to install pyParallel and call that directly.

psychopy.parallel.readPin(pinNumber)

Determine whether a desired (input) pin is high(1) or low(0).

Only pins ‘status’ pins (10-14 and 15) are currently read here, although the data pins (2-9) probably could be too.

psychopy.parallel.setData(data)

Set the data to be presented on the parallel port (one ubyte). Alternatively you can set the value of each pin (data pins are pins 2-9 inclusive) using setPin()

examples:

parallel.setData(0) #sets all pins low
parallel.setData(255) #sets all pins high
parallel.setData(2) #sets just pin 3 high (remember that pin2=bit0)
parallel.setData(3) #sets just pins 2 and 3 high

you can also convert base 2 to int v easily in python:

parallel.setData( int("00000011",2) )#pins 2 and 3 high
parallel.setData( int("00000101",2) )#pins 2 and 4 high

psychopy.parallel.setPin(pinNumber, state)

Set a desired pin to be high(1) or low(0).

Only pins 2-9 (incl) are normally used for data output:

parallel.setPin(3, 1)#sets pin 3 high
parallel.setPin(3, 0)#sets pin 3 low

psychopy.parallel.setPortAddress(address=888)

Set the memory address of your parallel port, to be used in subsequent commands

common port addresses:

LPT1 = 0x0378 or 0x03BC
LPT2 = 0x0278 or 0x0378
LPT3 = 0x0278