Reader EPooch needed a USB attached display for a future project. From initial research it seemed that most available solutions involved using a “usb to serial” adapter followed by a “serial to parallel” adapter and finally connecting that to the parallel interface on the lcd; Far from elegant. Eric decided to try using a USB to parallel cable intended for use with a printer. His first cable didn’t work out to well because of poor documentation. He ended up finding an adapter from Belkin that would work. Oddly, it works even though the cable was supposed to be Windows only and the Mac version of it isn’t made for OSX. Keep up the good work Eric and we hope to see more from you soon.
Who cares what OS the cable was made for. Hardware is always hackable. You just need the pin-outs and some mad skillz (as my brother likes to say). Pretty nifty hack, though. I likey!
not only do i want one… i really want to build it.
well, even though it said it wasn’t supported for osX, i don’t really pay attention to those specs and such on cables alot of the time. I’ve seen USB cables that say “designed for window$ xp” on the package. it’s a cable, set of wires with a couple plugs on the ends, as long as it follows the standards on the name of the package, it should work.
it seems i’ve seen quite a few computers that when the windows that it was designed for crapped out, they seemed to take to linux quite well.
Hackaday had a similar link a few weeks ago but for the PC. Anyone want to point me to it?
Why aren’t there any uppercase letters? It’s so odd. Anyway, I’ve got a Macally iShock, which is a USB gamepad with about nine hundred buttons on it, and I’ve used it under Windows and Linux since I stole it from my roommate five years ago. Good stuff, and who cares if it says ‘only works with a Mac’ on the box?
There are upper case letters (see the second line).
My comments are what about the LCD driver in OS X? I want to build a Mac version of a mini-itx net radio/appliance:
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/telefunkenpc/default.asp?page=1