Hi Guys,
Lets say I have an LED that I want to control via my computer. I've got a simple program that enables me to turn it on or off. Lets say I'm using the parallel port to control the LED. If I do something really basic like connecting an LED to one of the output pins on the parallel port, then I will need to be constantly supplying a voltage to it to keep it on i.e. sending 1's over the parallel port in intervals that would ensure that it looks like it's constantly getting a voltage.
This seems very inefficient to both from having to constantly supply power to it through the computer and the fact that I'm using bandwidth of the parallel port. When would it be worth my time to design a circuit (excuse the ingorance, I'm noob) but a circuit that has a ?controller? IC as well as other components I would imagine like capacitors etc that would then effectively only ever receive state change signals i.e. to turn the LED on or off. Then I can for example use solar panels for power to light my LEDs.
From my understanding, LEDs are not very power hungry, so maybe this setup is too elaborate but I'm trying to figure out how you would approach this problem when the question comes to scaling? For one LED this is probably way overkill, but for hundreds?
The other thing is, it doesn't necessarily have to be a parallel port, that's just an example that I understand that I'm pretty comfortable in being able to build a working LED contrallable from my PC. Ethernet might be a better option simply because I can send more data without having to worry about reaching the maximum limits of capacity of the "infrastructure".