[om-list] Ben's Christmas Light Project

[om-list at onemodel.org]

Dear fellow friends,

I have a programming question that some of you may be interested in.  My 
ultimate goal is to have my Christmas lights be controlled by my computer by 
means of a parallel port.  I have purchased some solid state relays (switches 
that are turned on by electriity, 3v DC to 32 v DC) that I will connect to a 
plug and to the lights, enabling me to control the 1 or 0 boolian value 
whether electrons are flowing throw the bulbs or not.  To do this I would like 
to use the Parallel Port because it has 8 output pins and seems like it will 
be the easiest method.  When one of those pins is electrified, it will conduct 
to the solid state relay, which will turn on that particular strand of lights.
 I've been doing some reading and the parallel port outputs an average of 4.5 
volts, which, relative to 3 volts, is very big, therefore there should be no 
problem in switching on the SSR's with the mere parallel port's electricity.

Here's where I run into my problem:

I don't know much about controlling ports in this manner.  I have researched 
some PERL modules that do this, but they seem to be slow and I don't know if I 
could use PERL for a project such as this and still respect myself.  I do know 
a small bit of c++, enough to write simple programs that calculate different 
things, but that's about the extent of my knowledge.  I am wondering if any of 
you can point me to a reliable source or show me a good library for 
controlling the PPort.  Also, if any of you have any ideas for this project, 
please let me know!

Thanks for your time,

--Ben Oman
benoman at cc.usu.edu