Using GPIO Pins, need to write driver?

Has anyone had any experience with using General Purpose Input Output pins on 3rd party boards?

The board will be proprietary but we are prototyping based on a few possible dev boards like Advantech boards
I found the GPIO pins to be something we would like to use since they are IDE'like ribbon cables that we can connect to a custom ISA socket.

Looking at the .NET Micro Framework but it uses drivers to interface with some popular boards.
Found the WDK as a possibility but other than creating a hello world driver I'm at a loss on how to connect to the cards pins.

Thanks for any help and sorry if this is not in the right forum.

you need a driver for the hardware, you can't directly "talk" to hardware in Win32 at the app level. ANd writing drivers isn't something you'll find help/assistance for easily because so few people come in contact with it. You'll need to know how to write a driver in general, and you'll need the technical manuals/data on how to actually access the hardware device.

And the it's all a matter of how the driver is made accessible to the App level, and there are tons of different approaches.
IOCTL calls is the low level one
A clean COM interface is the other end of the spectrum
I've also seen IO boards that need you to output data to a pseudo printer/com port.



You could probably have a look at the arduino project. This is a "small" programmable board that has IO pins (among others), and it's entirely open source and you'll find sources on the actual windows drivers etc. As well as tons of actual programs how to do something usefull with it.

Thanks for the reply. Yes that is what Ive been finding that there is very little help and info out there.

I have an Advantech, Phidgits and somewhere around here we may have the Ardrino. Ive even seen the Netdruino board which looks good but weak for our needs. If I could get a board to work with .NET that would be awesome.

Ive been messing around with the WDK and created a sample Kernal Mode Driver Function as well as a User Mode Driver Funciton but just got it complied off the templates.