I need to interface a mid 1990s laboratory instrument to Ubuntu 12.04 for moderately high speed data acquisition ( 100 Usec) from the instrument . The instrument requires ( will not even run without ) an interrupt driven IEEE1284 parallel port connection to a PC running a control, data acquisition, and GUI data display program. The instrument was originally designed to run with an OEM Windows 3.1 application. There is a 100 microsecond square wave clock running on ACK ( pin 10 STATUS register-6) for synchronous timing coordination of all three port registers: DATA, STATUS, CONTROL and interrupts. The instrument continuously send data to the PC on BOTH the STATUS and DATA registers.
I am writing a new control program and interrupt handler on Python/ Ubuntu. I am using Python parallel port module "PyParallel" ("parallelppdev.py" which DOES appear to have interrupt triggering capability in it's source code at line 485 ).
I have read speculation on the web that Ubuntu's kernel disables parallel port interrupts by default. Does anybody actually know if: 1) this is true 2) how to enable parallel port interrupts in Ubuntu 12.04 3) does use of interrupts require the userland program ( or driver module) to run with root privileges ? ?
