As one of my many projects for the holidays, I am attempting to make an external shift light (as I usually miss the small one). The light would be connected to the USB port and use the 6v from the port.

My problem is, I cannot figure out a way to get the light to turn on at the same time that the in-game one does.

Can anyone give me some suggestions/help as to what code I need to accomplish this?

Thanks in Advance,

Kyle

Even if you get the 5 volts from the USB you are going to need a controller board to get the light to switch on and off, its not as simple as connecting wires to a USB port.

I woulden't be connecting wires to the USB bus if I where you, you could fry something if you send voltage down the wrong line. Most likely you would ruin the USB controler, but worst case you could kill the computer.

You can get needed info from outgauge interface. But IMO the biggest problem is to program USB device to put voltage to data line. Maybe you can get some examples for user space USB programming on net. Google is your friend
It would be easier to use parallel port, where each pin can be easily programmed to 0/5V.
I don't see why he would need special controller ? USB host (or parallel port) itself is already a controller (unless he is going to use it just as an external voltage supply, but that makes no sense for simple project as this).

Update time.

Taking the advice that MonkOnHotTinRoof supplied, i am using the parallel port. I did some VB programming in engineering science, but have NFI how to use and link outguage to my VB program.

Can anyone help me with coding/outguage in general?
Or does anyone have a program which does this?

For referance,

Pins 18-25 have been bridged (they are all ground)
Data 0 is the other +ve pin in use

Thanks in advance,

Kyle

Are you using old native VB, or VB.net ? There are some old projects here, maybe they will share code with you:

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=1038796#post1038796
http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=398175#post398175

But, it should be pretty simple:

in a loop you receive UDP outgauge packets (look for specification in LFS directories), you decode them and extract the information that is in your interest. Then set LPT data pin 0 to 0 or 5V (write 1 to corresponding bit in data register, lots of info on net, you will need driver to control LPT pins from your code, such as inpout32)

some links (there are much better ones, but for starters...):

http://logix4u.net/Legacy_Port ... indows_98/2000/NT/XP.html
http://electrosofts.com/parallel/parallelwin.html

I never (lucky me) used VB so I can't help you in details. But if you don't have much experience with programming, you will probably spend more time on receiving packets than controlling lpt

You could use Python, as the pyinsim library supports OutGauge.

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=1078879#post1078879