Using relays to send input to computer

I have been wondering how it would be possible to monitor some of my car's functions via my pc. The main things I am thinking about are the doors opening and changing gears. I figure there has to be some way to notify my computer that this is happening because opening the door or changing gears causes lights to light up. I am somewhat new to electronics, but I am thinking that I could use a relay to control this. Maybe watching whatever line lights up the light...and using a keyboard controller to send notification to the computer. Would this work?

Search.

I have.

I dont understand what you are saying. You want the PC to control something when you open the door or change gear, or just monitoring?

If I read your post correct, it's very easy to "read" everything you mentioned using relais. Simply let the items you want to monitor drive the relais, attach 1 dataline from your lpt port to all the relais (contact-in) and connect all the contact-outs from the relais to the data-in pins from your LPT port. Write a 1 to the specific dataline from the LPT port, and read out the data-ins....

It's that simple

If you had searched, you would have found the long reply I wrote a few months ago about using industrial data acquisition boards, the parallel port, and VB. :) However, take a look at http://www.aaroncake.net/circuits/interfac.htm and then http://www.aaroncake.net/electronics/vblpt.htm . This isn't hard stuff to do, but it's a lot of effort to go through for something essentially pointless...

Thank you for your kindness and encouragement. If you're going to be a moderator, why be so negative? It's not like this board gets a million posts a day.

I was making a joke, I just forgot the :).

But for him it might be easier because he may be able to set up a circuit that sent a signal to his computer whenever a light went on on his dashboard

Check my post "My hardware/Software computer control system - Wish list/feedback - Easy power off" in this forum. I will be developing a system that in time (with the expended control handling) will be able to handle those possabilities. If you could give me an idea of what you want the computer to do when;

1: doors open
2: gears change (This will be hard to monitor)
3: etc

I'll add it to my list of things to ponder and we'll see what I can come up with after the 8 command handling version is beta tested and proved to work.