Parallel ports, the USB 6501 IO board & C++

[danand]

Hello,

I have some equipment I would like to send digital triggers to via the parallel port. My issue is that 64-bit Windows 7/10 seems to lack drivers for doing that. Another option is to use a USB->parallel port device. The one I am currently looking at is:

http://www.cortechsolutions.com/Products/SD/SD-MS/SD-MS-TC/001114

It apparently has a National Instruments USB 6501 OEM IO board and from what I can tell I would use NI-DAQmx to program it. From this readme http://download.ni.com/support/softlib//multifunction_daq/nidaqmx/16.0.1/readme.html it seems that later versions of Visual Studio are not supported. C++ is not mentioned either.

What I want/need is to include/link a 64-bit program/library, without any GUIs or large frameworks, that can be used/linked by Unreal Engine(64-bit and latest Visual C++(2015)). Can I use the 6501 for this purpose or do you have any other suggestions?

Cheers,

Daniel

[bstreiff]

The "ANSI C" support is just a C library. Even though newer versions of Visual Studio aren't listed as supposed, the Windows C ABIs and calling conventions haven't changed, so I would expect that to work fine.

For distribution, you do need NI-DAQmx installed on your target system. The smallest install of that is called the "NI-DAQmx Runtime" (latest version is presently 16.1.0). I don't know whether or not you would qualify that as a "large framework".