Writing pins to the RS232

[jay.dow at gmail.com]

First of all I'd like to thank all of you for your input.  It's nice to
have a place to throw ideas around and get some feedback.

I think the reason the serial source code I'm using is using javax.comm
stuff which is possibly part of Jython is because I'm on Mac OS X.
However this is just my guess as all of this is translucent to me and
difficult for me to decipher.

While I realize this is more on a driver/hardware level it's
interesting that it's so difficult to use a different protocol for an
existing driver.  For example, all serial does is a series of high and
low voltages on specific pins.  Why should it be so hard to use an
existing driver and hold a pin on high?  I guess the answer is, because
the driver is operating system specific, and because all of the drivers
and code that use that driver use the hardware in a very specific way.
If you ever wanted to use it for a different purpose you'd have to
start all the way at the bottom again.  While I can just use a serial
protocol to tell a chip to do what I'm looking for it seems like an
extra piece of hardware I don't need.

Looking into pyparallel, it seems this is much closer to my needs.  Now
I just need to purchase a usb to parallel adapter and do some further
experimenting.  Looking up some diagrams of how the parallel ports work
and some useful documentation I don't think I'll be running into any
more problems.