Can I use my laptop instead of a microcontroller?

Question

Programming

I have a lamp. It has three LEDs - red, green and blue, respectively. I want to make something out of this, but I don't have a microcontroller. Can I use my laptop instead of a microcontroller?

Answer 1

If he has GPIO then I see no obstacles.
If not at least buy a TTL whistle. But it will cost more than arduino or 85sparkfun

Answer 2

If this laptop of yours is old, has an LPT printer port on board, and the number of managed devices does not exceed 8, then the answer is yes. The fact is that the LPT port is easy to control programmatically, and knowledge of any information exchange protocols is not required. You just need to write zeros and ones to certain port registers (at fixed addresses that are configured in the BIOS), and signals with levels of +5 and 0 volts will appear on eight lines of the port. And how exactly to use these signals is shown in this picture:
All other methods are much more complicated, you can’t do without protocols there.