rooneyl

You may want to check out Mister House.

You could also look at using an Arduino (see Arduino and PERL or search the web for more information) and its various available shields (ethernet, touch screen OLED etc) or build your own circuits.

Update: I just remembered about the following posts, perhaps there are more you could find via super search:

Using Perl to make a hot-lead from any port

Does Perl ring a bell?

Hope this helps

Martin

Thanks for the links. The Mister House looks great (and complicated). However, I would like to try coding myself, starting very basic (eg turn light on/off). I have read some articles that show wiring LEDs to the parallel port, then controlling them by issuing commands to the port. What I suppose I am asking is if there is a method to issue commands straight to the parallel port (a bit like the outportb function in c).

Then perhaps Device::SerialPort is what you are looking for.

Hope this helps

Martin

My staring points for Perl doing neat stuff around the farm and home...

Arduino and RPi