Thank you Justin for your input. I went to the hit and yes, I have that pinout. In fact, maybe I goofed up this thread with my subject line being "gpib pinout". What I really have here is an older CNC spinning machine that has an older PC talking to a STD type buss rack with another GPIB CPU, PLC, I/O, MCC, and 4 axis cards. Quite a full rack. The PC is really just used for program storage and modifiying (tuning the program) while the rack mounted equipment really run the machine. The PC and the Rack talk to each other over a simple HPIB/GPIB 24 pin centronics cable. Just a standard cable that HP introduced into industrial controls lots of years back. When we bought this machine new in 1988, it also came with a digitizer, plotter and a dot matrix printer. All the HP devices have been used for years. However, when a device was needed to be used, the cable going to the device needed to be plugged into the GPIB 24 pin centronics connector. It really was just daisy chaining or really piggy back. That was the real intent of HP, back in the day, when they came out with this "Interface Buss" idea. We needed to plug and unplug the device we wanted to use simply because the builder really did not make good provisions. But, it has worked for years. Now, I need to define the help I need after all of this rambling. I will get to the point. Really what has happened is, the printer failed a few years back and the operator threw it away along with the cable. Apparently, they got bye without the need for a printer for quite some time. Well, guess what........ We now need to print to a printer. Well, with the vintage of this equipment, I can not just go out and get a common ink jet with the standard USB stuff. HA, I found a brand new Panasonic KXP-1150 dot matrix printer on E-bay for a song..... Now I need to build a printer cable.. I have the pinouts of A: Parallel DB25 to 36 pin Centronics cable and actually have just that cable. B: the pinout of the 24 pin IEEE488/ GPIB connector that I need to use. The problem is when I look at the signal descriptions on the different pinouts I am very confused on how to proceed. The 8 parallel data bits (pins) are fine. It is when I see pin 1 of the DB25 being a strobe signal, I do not know how to cross reference that to any signal in the GPIB connector. The GPIB connector does not have any other signals that call themselves the same. That is where all of my confussion lies. I need to ask myself what is really needed to run an old dot matrix printer? Iknow we need the 8 data bits, I would also think there needs to be some software handshaking of some sort (as you can read into the signal descriptions of the DB 25 pinout).
At the end of the day and 3 cold brewski's, I just need to build the cable that got thrown away....)
Can anyone help?
Thank you more than you know
Jeff
