Hello all,

I am currently building a little project to control some motor and aquire some data for which I am using the parellel port. I was how ever wondering if any one has done any thing like this using the usb port? I have had a quick google and all I can come up with is people who sell expensive premade boards ready for you to conect your motor to or ready to plug in a probe and do the anolog to digital convertion it's self. So out of curiosity has anyone ever hacked the usb port like you can the parellel nd serial port? If so was it alot more difficults to do / program?

T

You could try looking up some hardware hacking howto's on Google with "USB Hacking" as your search term. Even if some of the programming examples aren't native to your usual programming language it's probably simple enough to be converted into some other language. USB is after all just a glorified serial port, and I don't think a simple USB board should cost more than, say, $50~ish if you wanted something to tinker with, and perhaps there's some schematic out there to build one from scratch.
Here's one example starting point: http://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$=main/howto/mind.htm