using commodity sound cards for analog I/O

I recently came across this project to build an electronic card reader using a PC with a soundcard:

[www.gae.ucm.es]

it leverages the DAC and analog I/O ports that come with the soundcard so that the sensors are plugged directly into the audio input jack, and the actors into the audio output jack. Then control software is run in the CPU of the PC. No microcontroller is needed.

This seems like a neat idea. It makes me wonder if it'd be possible to replace (either completely or partially) the electronics in RepRap using this technique, thereby cutting down production cost.

There's already projects out there using the same idea to run laser projectors, [marcansoft.com] is a really cool example.

The best way to get this working would be a Linux set up with a realtime kernel and some Jack goodness me thinks but you would run into a lot of problems too.

Though this could be a good idea on an EMC2 set up to easily get the temp readings from the extruder, that's got me thinking a bit.