motor shield directly to PC? WITHOUT ARDUINO!

Question

Is there a way to connect and control motor shield board WITHOUT Arduino at all. can i connect it directly to my PC ? i'm getting confused since i red lot of topics that people use existing pins on motherboard. enter image description here

• chrisl: Is there a reason, why you would want to do this? Misusing a motherboard like that (if it is really possible) does only make sense, if you are doing it for the fun of hacking your motherboard. It would be way more complicated and would definitely don't cost much more, than the typical arduino/microcontroller solution. If an original Arduino costs too much, you can buy a china clone, which are way cheaper.
• Glitch Fish: It's educational. why can not we just use UBS output to control something like motor shield board, can get's it's ones and zeroes from USB instead of arduino, since we have all the computing power we need on PC? is there any USB version of motor control boards? and why not..

Answer 1

This superuser post might help.

Raspberry Pis have GPIO pins that you can use to communicate with a motor shield, but regular (intel-based) PCs usually don't. In any case, you wouldn't want to mess with motherboard pins anyway; a short circuit might easily fry your computer.

If you don't want to use an Arduino, you can use a USB-to-serial converter (such as a small FTDI circuit) along with a motor driver that uses serial communication.

However, this wouldn't be any simpler or cheaper than just using an Arduino.

Answer 2

To a normal PC? No. You can't. A PC doesn't have the GPIO pins etc that are needed.

You could wire it to a Pi though.

Answer 3

If you have a PC with a real Parallel Port ( LPT1: ) and you don't run an Operating System on it, ( or perhaps MS-DOS ) ... you can connect some leds, but you cannot use an Arduino shield directly.

• Edgar Bonet: Re "If [...] you don't run an Operating System on it": You can do it on Linux from a privileged process, if you first request access to the port's IO registers with ioperm(0x378, 3, 1);.