. . . And Using It with a Computer

If the circuit with a test LED hookup works so far, well done; you have built a fancy TV remote tester. Because generic, cheap phototransistors are eager to pick up infrared light, your creation should “translate” IR (infrared) into visible light, but that’s about all the fun stuff it will do. To make it a bit more useful, you need to interface the circuit with the computer. A good way to do so is through a line printer interface, LPT, if your computer has one. Unfortunately, this wonderful hardware hacker’s tool is being dropped from some of the more compact and fancy designs.

Although initially designed to be unidirectional (for output only), the LPT interface provides a number of status feedback lines, such ...

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