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• Description
• Features
• Compatibility
• [Installation] (#installation)
• License
• Acknowledgements

HP-IL (Hewlett Packard Interface Loop) is a serial interconnection bus introduced by Hewlett-Packard in the early 1980s. It enabled the communication between peripheral devices such as printers, floppy disk drives etc. with programmable calculators such as the HP-41C, HP71B and HP-75C/D.

The connection to PCs was realized by either an generic ISA bus card or a serial interface controller. As these devices are not available any more, Jean-Francois Garnier published his PIL-Box project in 2009 to link a PC via USB to the HP-IL system.

The PC operating system communicates with the PIL-Box as a virtual serial device over USB. The PIL-Box is connected to the HP-IL Loop.

pyILPER is a program that reads incoming HP-IL frames from the PIL-Box, processes them by emulating some virtual HP-IL devices, like a printer, a disk drive or a terminal and sends the processed frames back to the loop.

• Entirely written in Python3 using the QT GUI-Framework
• Up to 5 virtual mass storage drives with integrated directory list, file management (import, export, rename, purge, view) and disk management functions (label, pack, initialize)
• Up to 3 virtual printers emulating the HP-71B, HP-41C and ROMAN-8 character sets
• Terminal emulator with keyboard support (HP-71B only). Requires at least version 1.6 of the PIL-Box firmware
• HP-IL scope
• The number of virtual devices is configurable
• The output of the scope or the virtual printer(s) is logged to file(s)
• Monitoring the status of the virtual HP-IL devices
• Support for the PIL-Box via serial-over-usb interface
• Support for virtual HP-IL over TCP/IP (dual TCP/IP V4/V6 stack)

pyILPER has been successful tested with LINUX, Windows 7 and Mac OS X.

pyILPER requires the Python interpreter and the Qt framework installed. Thanks to the Anaconda Python distribution system pyILPER and the required software components can be easily installed on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.

See the Installation Instructions for details.

In order to use the file and disk management functions an up to date version of the [LIFUTILS] (https://github.com/bug400/lifutils/releases) are required as well.

pyILPER is published under the GNU General Public License v2.0 License (see LICENSE file).

Much code was taken from ILPER for Windows (Copyright (c) 2008-2013 J-F Garnier, Visual C++ version by Christoph Gießelink 2016. The terminal emulator code was taken from the pyqterm console widget by Henning Schroeder. The virtual TCP/IP support of pyILPER was significantly improved by Christoph Gießelink who also provided many other improvements.