Dead LPT port?

[DukerX]

I've been playing around whit the MACH3 software a bit, but when I went about hooking up a cable to my LPT1 port, I doesn't seem to get any sinals, either input nor output.
I haven't connected any machinery yet. was just trying to get a view of the pulsetrain on my scope.
The (working) scope just shows me zero volts on all pins, no matter what I do.
I then tried to set up some inputs in MACH3, but the indicators didn't light up no matter what I did.
I thought that even if the pins are "NC", the internal circuits in the LPT would pull the line to +5v and show up as "Active" when pulled to GND. That didn't work.
Also tried setting "Active low" to zero, but manually pulling the pin to +5v didn't change anything.

I'm starting to worry about the health of my LPT port.
Is there a way of testing the LPT port (wich I haven't used for years) whitout actually hooking up a printer of sorts (wich I don't even have)?

If my LPT port are really dead. Could I use one of these USB->LPT adaptors whit MACH3, or would that just make a big mess?

[mlaws1172]

did you check to make sure it had not been disabled in set up? Or had come
loose ?

Mike Laws

[unterhaus]

Do you have a breakout board attached? Is the port enabled in the bios? If you were just excercising the port using Mach, I suppose it's possible that it's not finding it. I'm just throwing out ideas, so don't be offended. I do a lot of work with data acquisition hardware and computers, and I find that such hardware often does nothing if any little thing is wrong.


You can't use a USB dongle, the timing will not be right. The way I look at it, a PCI printer port board is a cheap investment even on a cheap motherboard. It's a lot more work replacing a smoked mobo than a smoked pci board.

[DukerX]

Well...
My LPT port is working like a charm. The problem was me. Not the hardware.
No.. It wasn't disabled in BIOS or anything like that.
In my enthusiasm and typical hurry, I ignored the warning that I might would like to reboot after installing MACH3.
I tried rebooting several times after I found out it didn't work, but the harm was already done.
The solution?
Run "C:\Mach3\OCXDriverTest.exe" once and reboot.

After that, everything was in working order.
The downside is that I realize my stepper driver design need alot more work.

Aprechiate the input.