A far more useful case is to provide a power supply for the microcontroller programmer, which has no wall wart. Today’s microcontrollers consume less current than their predecessors, so you can easily ...

So I'm trying to detect through Visual Basic 6.0 when a voltage change occurs on one of the pins of the serial/parallel port. The whole thing is pretty simple; no data transfer/handshaking/etc ...

The most common way of programming AVR microcontrollers is the In System Programming port. That little six-pin header with MOSIs and MISOs coming out of it will program every AVR you’ll ever ...