Printer port control?

[haywirepc]

Can someone tell me, can you turn off or on the printer port lines in amiga basic,
or some other programming language easily?

I have an idea for a simple home automation project, I just need to be able to turn the lines of the printer port low or high.

I know how to do this on a pc, but I never tried it on an amiga.

Any help or doc files would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Steven

[haywirepc]

Thanks for everyone's help...

Today, I found out how to use the joystick ports as digital inputs and can read them in amiga basic fine. This means an amiga can make quite an effective burglar alarm...

On the printer port...

I am sure what I need to do can be done, it will require some research. Essentially, I want to hook leds to the the 8 lines and be able to turn them on or off in basic or some other language. I  can use some photocells and relays and other electronics to turn on and off whatever I want. I thought this might be a cool use for an a500 I have sitting around not doing much. I had some old hardware projects like this saved from magazines in a binder somewhere, wish I could find that binder now!

Steven

[haywirepc]

http://www.velleman.eu/products/view/?id=351282

Did you mean this? Do you think I can control that via the amiga's serial ports by sending serial strings through basic? I saw something like that before where you'd send 8 characters through the serial port (one for each relay). like 00000000 - all off 11111111 - all on. 00000001 - all off but 8 and so on...

Bloodline, yes I just recently saw those arduino boards. I'm very behind on microcontrollers, last one I played with alot was a basic stamp 2. That arduino is like having 3 or 4 basic stamp 2's in one, its really slick. I'm a bit intimidated by the programming language it uses, but I think it may be worth learning for all the options that tiny board has...

Thanks for everyone's suggestions. How do you control leds, lights, relays, whatever using an aimga? Any suggestions welcome!

Steven