I ran into a problem today when testing my new geckodrive 320's and servo motors when I found out my laptops parallel port is using 3.5v and geckodrive 320's are made to run with 5v. Since I can't tell just by looking what/if a breakout board is going to do any level shifting for me I'm stuck =>... be nice if there is a relatively cheap circuit I can craft to accomplish this even if its on a breadboard.
My rather limited electronics knowledge is telling me I may be able to use a regulated voltage source and 555 timers but there must be a better solution. Maybe an opto that can run on 3.5-5v so it would work with both 3.5v and 5v computer parallel ports.
Just had a thought... isn't there a parallel port plug available somewhere that does this using a wall power supply? So I put this plug on my computer than my cable into the plug and voila 5v logic?