Ok, so here's some info, for those of you who
- don't want to purchase the Phidgets encoder
- have a bug up your butt about doing this yourself (like me!)
Parts as listed in previous post; see attachments for pic of (probable) circuit and (rough) software to get useful info out of the parallel port.
The software is still academic - I haven't gotten my encoder, yet.
But it reads the (currently bogus) data from the parport just fine, and the encoder connection should be a snap. Oh, and it
polls the parallel port - not optimum, but seems to be not such the resource hog that I thought it'd be.
Note: Please don't ask me how to get this stuff to run on your machine - if I can figure it out, so can everybody else.
Note #2: This completed whatchamathingy will be included in a post about my car pc install when said install is completed. No idea when that'll be; hopefully soon!
Note #3: the encoder I'll be using is kind of pricey (~$20) for what you get; I'm sure that a more economical version would work just fine, with appropriate circuit/software modifications.