Robotics and parallel ports

[Peter Hansen]

Isaac T Alston wrote:
> I've never actually built a robot or anything like that
> before, so I'm welcome to any advice I can get! I've heard programming via
> USB is hard, so that's why I'm using the parallel port (serial ports are
> said to be slow when sending a lot of data (I think)). 

How much data do you plan to send?  We build industrial control systems 
and robotics for laboratories and use serial ports most of the time 
without much concern for performance.  Generally speaking you shouldn't 
have to send lots of data, and only rare have to receive lots (e.g. if 
you have a camera on-board).

The only time I'd consider a parallel port is in the very early stages 
if I had no intelligence in the robot, and simply needed a few discrete 
output signals to turn motors on and off.  In a prototype, for example. 
  For anything real I would likely have on-board intelligence (embedded 
Linux system maybe, or a microcontroller board) and in that case a 
serial port is going to be much easier to work with than a parallel port.

-Peter