Talking to MiCOM Protection Relay via parallel printer port

I've encountered a fairly new MiCOM protection relay that for some reason can only accept firmware updates via a 25-pin parallel printer port. The engineering laptop on-site is a Windows 7 machine and I'm having trouble getting an LPT port set-up for the installed MiCOM software to use for comms to the relay.

I've tried using a USB-to-DB25 cable, but apparently that's only meant to be used for printers as the driver installed is a USB printer driver rather than a virtual LPT port. I've tried redirecting LPT1 to this virtual USB port as way to 'trick' the laptop, but to no avail. As it appears the cable driver is only limited to sending printer commands.

Are there any LPT-converters that allow me to send raw data in the same fashion as a USB-serial converter and can run in a Windows 7 environment?

Thanks.

Jaycar used to have some printer ports that plugged into a PCI slot if that would help.

Getting an actual parallel port PCI card is not great an option for me because it also requires purchasing an external PCI expansion of some sort, as this relay's already installed in a substation so will need a laptop to actually talk to it.

I was wondering if there existed an USB-DB25 cables to worked like your typical USB-to-serial converter and just creates a general purpose LPT port. Most of the ones I've found on Google seem to only work specifically with printers.

Have a look at this one - supposed to work with Zip drives and the like as well. Good luck. https://www.jaycar.com.au/usb-to-parallel-bi-directional-cable/p/XC4847

Thanks, might keep an eye out for this the next time I'm at Jaycar.

You may try Single Parallel Port Fast Ethernet Print Server like one from TP-LINK or similair....

Hello Scrambled
For the micom px4x ,the only choice is a true hardware parallel port !

I keep 2 old xp machines just for this purpose.
also you better pay attention to the wiring diagram in the manual,
some of the pins are dual purpose,so disconnect at the 25 pin connector
or make sure all
test bits are off.
regards.

raviv said:

Hello Scrambled
For the micom px4x ,the only choice is a true hardware parallel port !

I keep 2 old xp machines just for this purpose.
also you better pay attention to the wiring diagram in the manual,
some of the pins are dual purpose,so disconnect at the 25 pin connector
or make sure all
test bits are off.
regards.

Click to expand...

Cheers, raviv. The relevant pin-out information I can find in the P14x manual for the front parallel port are for the 8 monitoring bits, which I am not using because all I want right now to do is download custom menu text for the alarms (and also firmware updates for future as mentioned before). Is there another more complete wiring diagram that I can reference?

Also, it's a bit disappointing that I have to get a physical parallel port just to do something simple like change the default alarm text on the relay screen display. I can't think of any practical reason why they'd do it that way, when everything else is perfectly programmable via RS232 or Ethernet!