Like let’s say I have a few old HP alphanumeric LED displays that have a simple bit pattern protocol. I’ve gotten them working in Arduino a long time ago. If I can find some unused pins how can I bit bang them into a custom protocol from user space using pins that may be unrelated as far as I/O ports on a modern computer? Is it even possible without a kernel module? Am I stuck with using a serial channel like SPI/I2C/UART to talk to an external controller?
I recall that there is a USB GPIO dongle which gives you a bunch of pins to play with. You would have to hunt around to find it though.