I have a potential customer with some industrial kit that currently prints to an obsolete parallel port (Centronics) printer. They need to keep the kit but ditch the printer, sending the data to a "black box" instead that logs that data.
I'd like to do this on a Linux box, any suggestions?
Off the top of my head I am thinking I'll need to do a parallel to serial conversion first, then pull the raw serial data into something that can interpret however the data is being encoded for printing. But it's turned out to be quite a hard thing to Google for (although I have found some bits that might be useful). Alternatively I wonder whether the I/O pins on a Pi or Beaglebone could be used to emulate a printer (although I might be way out of my depth there...)
Another approach might be lptcap[1] although that's intended for DOS (FreeDOS??)
[1] http://www.qi.fcen.uba.ar/materias/iqi/paralel1/home.clear.net.nz/pages/khei...