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Parallel Port Programming (PART 1): with C

By HarshaPerla

Parallel port is a very commonly known port, widely used to connect the printer to the PC.
If you see backside of your computer, there will be a port having 25 pins with a small
symbol like this: . That port is known as LPT port or printer port. We can program this
port for device control and data transfer. In this article, we will learn basics of parallel port
and programming the parallel port.

Parallel port basics:

In computers, ports are used mainly for two reasons: Device control and
communication. We can program PC's Parallel ports for both. Parallel ports are mainly
meant for connecting the printer to the PC. But we can program this port for many more
applications beyond that.
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Access to parallel ports

Visual Basic 6.0 to VB.NET, Delphi Windows Vista,
both x86 and x64
www.zealsoft.com/ntport/

Parallel ports are easy to program and faster compared to the serial ports. But main
disadvantage is it needs more number of transmission lines. Because of this reason
parallel ports are not used in long distance communications. Let us know the basic
difference between working of parallel port and serial port. In serial ports, there will be two
data lines: One transmission and one receive line. To send a data in serial port, it has to be
sent one bit after another with some extra bits like start bit, stop bit and parity bit to detect
errors. But in parallel port, all the 8 bits of a byte will be sent to the port at a time and a
indication will be sent in another line. There will be some data lines, some control and
some handshaking lines in parallel port. If three bytes of data 01000101 10011100
10110011 is to be sent to the port, following figures will explain how they are sent to the
serial and parallel ports respectively. We can understand why parallel port communication
is faster compared to that of serial.

Parallel port basics:

In computers, ports are used mainly for two reasons: Device control and
communication. We can program PC's Parallel ports for both. Parallel ports are mainly
meant for connecting the printer to the PC. But we can program this port for many more
applications beyond that.

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Parallel ports are easy to program and faster compared to the serial ports. But main
disadvantage is it needs more number of transmission lines. Because of this reason
parallel ports are not used in long distance communications. Let us know the basic
difference between working of parallel port and serial port. In serial ports, there will be two
data lines: One transmission and one receive line. To send a data in serial port, it has to be
sent one bit after another with some extra bits like start bit, stop bit and parity bit to detect
errors. But in parallel port, all the 8 bits of a byte will be sent to the port at a time and a
indication will be sent in another line. There will be some data lines, some control and
some handshaking lines in parallel port. If three bytes of data 01000101 10011100
10110011 is to be sent to the port, following figures will explain how they are sent to the
serial and parallel ports respectively. We can understand why parallel port communication
is faster compared to that of serial.

Serial port: Data transmission

will be bitwise, one after another.
For more detail on RS232
serial port programming and
connections, read our article "Serial
Communication using RS232
port". This article explains serial
port programming with example
source code PC to PC chat in DOS
with direct cable connection.

electroSofts.com will soon

bring you an article on serial port
programming in Windows.

figure 1.0 © electroSofts.com

Parallel Port: Data transmission is byte wise:

Whole byte at a time.
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figure 1.1                               © electroSofts.com

In the PC there will be D-25 type of female connector having 25 pins and in the printer,
there will be a 36-pin Centronics connector. Connecting cable will combine these
connecter using following convention. Pin structure of D-25 and Centronics connecters are
explained bellow.

D25- Pin Centronics 36

Function
Number Pin Number
1 1 Strobe
2 to 9 2 to 9 Data Lines
10 10 Acknowledgement
11 11 Busy
12 12 Out of Paper
13 13 Select
14 14 Auto feed
15 15, 32 Error

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16 16, 31 Init
17 17, 36 Select In
18 to 25 18 to 30, 33 GND

- 34, 35 N/C

figure 1.2

Table 1.0: Pin numbers and functions

Now let us know how communication between PC and printer takes place.
Computer places the data in the data pins, then it makes the strobe low. When strobe goes
low, printer understands that there is a valid data in data pins. Other pins are used to send
controls to the printer and get status of the printer, you can understand them by the names
assigned to the pins.

To use the printer port for applications other than printing, We need to know how
ports are organized. There are three registers associated with LPT port: Data register,
Control register and Status register. Data register will hold the data of the data pins of the
port. That means, if we store a byte of data to the data register, that data will be sent to the
data pins of the port. Similarly control and status registers. The following table explains
how these registers are associated with ports.

Pin No (D-Type Direction

SPP Signal Register.bit
25) In/out
1* nStrobe In/Out Control.0
2 Data 0 In/Out Data.0
3 Data 1 In/Out Data.1
4 Data 2 In/Out Data.2

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5 Data 3 In/Out Data.3

6 Data 4 In/Out Data.4
7 Data 5 In/Out Data.5
8 Data 6 In/Out Data.6
9 Data 7 In/Out Data.7
10 nAck In Status.6
11* Busy In Status.7
Paper-Out / Paper-
12 In Status.5
End
13 Select In Status.4
14* nAuto-Linefeed In/Out Control.1
15 nError / nFault In Status.3
16 nInitialize In/Out Control.2
nSelect-Printer/
17* In/Out Control.3
nSelect-In
18 - 25 Ground Gnd

Table 1.1: Pin directions and associated registers.

* Pins with * symbol in this table are hardware inverted. Than means, If a pin has a
'low' ie. 0V, Corresponding bit in the register will have value 1.

Signals with prefix 'n' are active low. That means, Normally these pins will have low
value. When it needs to send some indication, it will become high. For example, Normally
nStrobe will be high, when the data is placed in the port, computer makes that pin low.

Normally, data, control and status registers will have following addresses. We need
these addresses in programming later.

Register LPT1 LPT2

Data register (Base Address + 0) 0x378 0x278
Status register (Base Address + 1) 0x379 0x279

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Control register (Base Address + 2) 0x37a 0x27a

Note: All the parallel ports do not have bidirectional capability. Earlier parallel ports
had only output enabled in data pins since printers only inputs data. But latter, to make
parallel port capable of communicating with other devises, bidirectional ports are
introduced.

By default, data port is output port. To enable the bidirectional property of the port,
we need to set the bit 5 of control register.

To know the details of parallel ports available in your computer, follow this
procedure:

Right click on My Computer, go to "Properties".

Select the tab Hardware, Click Device manager.

You will get a tree structure of devices; In that Expand "Ports(Com1 & LPT)".

Double Click on the ECP Printer Port(LPT1) or any other LPT port if available.

You will get details of LPT port. Make sure that "Use this Port (enable)" is


selected.

Select tab recourses. In that you will get the address range of port.

To start programming, you will need a D-25 type Male connector. Its pin structures
can be found in the connector as follows:
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Programming the printer port in DOS:

To start programming the port, we will use DOS. In DOS we have commands to
access the port directly. But, these programs will not work on the systems based on
Windows XP, Windows NT or higher versions. For security reason, higher versions of the
windows does not allow accessing the port directly. To program the parallel port in these
systems, we need to write kernel mode driver. In the part II, I am going to explain about
programming the parallel port in windows XP. If you want to run the same program in
Windows XP, For studying you can use the technique that I have posted in this forum.

When we want to find out whether particular pin of the port is high or low, we need to
input the value of corresponding register as a byte. In that, we have to find out whether the
corresponding bit is high or low using bitwise operators. We can't access the pins
individually. So, you need to know basic bitwise operations.

Main bitwise operators that we need are bitwise AND '&' and bitwise OR '|'. To make
a particular bit in a byte high without affecting other bits, write a byte with corresponding bit
1 and all other bits 0; OR it with original byte. Similarly, to make particular bit low, write a
byte with corresponding bit 0 and all other bits 1; AND it with original byte.

In Turbo C, there are following functions used for accessing the port:

outportb( PORTID, data);

data = inportb( PORTID);

outport( PORTID, data);

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data = inport( PORTID);

outport() function sends a word to port, inport() reads a word from the port. outportb()
sends a byte to port and inportb() reads a byte from the port. If you include DOS.H header,
these functions will be considured as macro, otherwise as functions. Function inport() will
return a word having lower byte as data at PORTID and higher byte as data at PORTID+2.
So, we can use this function to read status and control registers together. inportb() function
returns byte at PORTID. outport() writes the lower byte to PORTID and higher byte to
PORTID+1. So this can be used to write data and control together. outportb() function write
the data to PORTID. outport() and outportb() returns nothing.

Let us start with inputting first. Here is an example program, copy it and run in Turbo
C or Borland C without anything connected to parallel port. Then you should see data
available in status register and pin numbers 10, 11, 12, 13 and 15 of the parallel port. Pin
11 (active low) is 0 and all other pins are 1 means it is OK.

/* file: ex1.c
by HarshaPerla for electroSofts.com.
Displays contents of status register of parallel port.
Tested with TurboC 3.0 and Borland C 3.1 for DOS.
*/

#include"stdio.h"
#include"conio.h"
#include"dos.h"

#define PORT 0x378

void main()
{
int data;
clrscr();
while(!kbhit())
{

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data=inportb(PORT+1);
gotoxy(3,10);
printf("Data available in status register: %3d (decimal),
%3X (hex)\n", data, data);
printf("\n Pin 15: %d",(data & 0x08)/0x08);
printf("\n Pin 13: %d",(data & 0x10)/0x10);
printf("\n Pin 12: %d",(data & 0x20)/0x20);
printf("\n Pin 11: %d",(data & 0x80)/0x80);
printf("\n Pin 10: %d",(data & 0x40)/0x40);
delay(10);
}
}

Access to parallel
ports
Visual Basic 6.0 to
VB.NET, Delphi
Windows Vista, both
x86 and x64
www.zealsoft.com/ntport/

To understand bitwise operations: you want to find data in pin 15, value of (data & 0x08)
will be 0x08 if bit 3 of register is high, 0therwise.

bit no. 7654 3210 bit no. 7654 3210

data : XXXX 1XXX data : XXXX 0XXX
& with : 0000 1000 (0x08 ) & with : 0000 1000 (0x08 )
-> 0000 1000 (0x08 -> bit 3 is high ) -> 0000 0000 (0x00 -> bit 3 is low)

We will use the same logic throughout the article.

Now, take a D-25 male with cables connected to each pins. Short all the pins from 18
to 25, call it as ground. Now you can run above program and see the change by shorting
pins 10, 11, 12, 13 and 15 to ground. I prefer using switches between each input pins and
ground. Be careful, do not try to ground the output pins.
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To find out the availability of ports in a computer programmatically, we will use the
memory location where the address of port is stored.

0x408 0x409 0x40a 0x40b 0x40c 0x40d

LPT1 LPT1 LPT2 LPT2 LPT3 LPT3
low high low high low high
byte byte byte byte byte byte

If you run the the following code in Turbo C or Borland C, You will get the addresses of
available ports.

/*PortAdd.c
To find availability and addresses of the lpt ports in the
computer.

*/

#include <stdio.h>
#include <dos.h>
void main()
{
unsigned int far *ptraddr; /* Pointer to location of Port
Addresses */
unsigned int address; /* Address of Port */
int a;
ptraddr=(unsigned int far *)0x00000408;
clrscr();

for (a = 0; a < 3; a++)

{
address = *ptraddr;
if (address == 0)
printf("No port found for LPT%d \n",a+1);

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else
printf("Address assigned to LPT%d is 0x%X
\n",a+1,address);
ptraddr++;
}
getch();
}

Next we will go to check output pins. To check the output, we will use LED's. I have
driven LED's directly from the port. But it is preferred to connect a buffer to prevent
excessive draw of current from the port. Connect an LED in series with a resister of 1KW
or 2.2KW between any of the data pins(2 to 9) and ground. With that, if you run the
program given below, you should see the LED blinking with app. 1 sec frequency.

#include"conio.h"
#include"dos.h"

#define PORT 0x378

void main()
{
while(!kbhit())
{
outportb(PORT, ~inportb(PORT) );
delay(1000);
}
}

I will stop this part here itself. Next part of this article is now ready. In the PART 2,
you will learn programming the parallel port in VC++. PART 2 is designed for the beginners
of VC++. Click here to Read part 2.

Part 3 is having the example using LCD module. There we are going to learn
connecting LCD module to parallel port. Read part 3.

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Also Read...

-Programming the Parallel Port(PART 2): with VC++

-Programming the 16x2 LCD module with Parallel Port: Example 1
-PC Based Game show/Quiz buzzer: Interfacing project example 2
-Serial communication via RS232 with C
-Links to port programming related articles in other sites
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