Reading Ascii charactors from Parallel port???

Question

Greetings:
I have a question about instructing a third party vender who is writing code in VB6.0. (windows XP sp2) 
They will be sending cycle counts thru the parallel port to my computer that i will be capturing using Labview 7.1.1 (windows XP sp2)
The format of the streaming will be Ex.   *000000324*000000325*000000326*... etc. Continuously
I can tell him to get rid of leading zeros if need be.
 I think i can capture this using VISA serial read.
a) But what should i tell the third party vender for him to write to the parallel port?  Also should set the printer port to RAW
    and/or bi-directional printing .
b) What is the pinout of the parallel cable between the two computers , is there a Null modem type of cable available, or is it pin to pin?
c) What about handshaking , such as printer not ready, buffer full, etc.etc.
Any help would be apreciated.
 Thanks
 Forrest 
[email protected]
to modify thier software to a
Parallel port. so that i could capture.
I have a third party group that is running a process sending and receiving
 data
> thru a USB port for control of a frequency test. They are keeping track of
> cycle counts that
> are important in there test. They are using Visual Basic 6.0.
>
> What I want to do is to send the cycle counts ( which could be up to
> 999,999,999 cycles)
> (on an older system I would capture the cycle counts from a RS232 port
that
> they were send to me on another computer[Running Labview 7.1.1])
>
> I need ( since RS232 ports are sort of going away on new computer system
> nowadays) to capture a streaming cycle count from the third Party system.
> etc which will be continuous. They can modify there Visual Basic 6.0 to
> incorporate USB drivers for your chips. I will be capturing the Data
either
> RS232 or USB into Labview 7.1.1 .
>
> I noticed you had drives on your web site with VB and Labview.
>
> Could you guys give me some suggestions if possible.
> Thanks
>
>

Answer 1

Hi Forrest,
Okay... that makes more sense.  You are trying to communicate beetween 2 PC's.  Something like LapLink.. And yes, it would be okay to do this with the parallel port, it may have more speed than the serial port.  However for ease of implementation, you can use the serial port communication.  It is actually quite easy to implement. 
The first step (if you are using Windows), is to establish the communication between the PC's using Hyperterminal.  You should be able to "chat" between the 2 PC's.  Maybe I shouldn't use the word chat..  You can communicate (Tx/Rx - ASCII) between the 2 PC's.  Once you verify that this works (at the desired speed - and configuration), you can implement it in Labview. 
RayR