I have owned one of these boards for a couple of years and can confirm that it is a brillient offering at a very reasonable price. One of these boards enables your desktop or laptop to communicate with real electircal devices.

I had fun creating some triggered Hallown effects for a party using it with a pressure mat and an IR beam to trigger audio and lighting effects. My tip is to also buy a software product called IOGateway (not a Mplain offering) which presents the card as an ActiveX object thus opening it up to a range of software development environments.

The software that came with the card was somewhat restrictive but using IOGateway I was able to use Excel VBA to program it at a relativly high level and integrate links to the Microsoft Media Player. The same technique could also be used to use the card as a data logging device that dumps the measurements into a spreadsheet.

You need a reasonable level of electronic and programming knowledge to use it but if you have the skills this card is a great entry level interface for a wide variety of projects that require input / output of analogue and digital connections between a Windows computer and external devices.

This board is a great way to use a PC to control external electrical & electronic projects, and was easy to build. I've created an ActiveX control for it together with sample programs in C# and Visual Basic (VS2010), Excel using VBA, LabVIEW, and HTML via JScript. The code works under XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit versions). The package includes full documentation, both as a PDF manual and as compiled html Help that is available in the design time environments for the application programs. My site can be found by searching for "arembe"

Fantastic piece of kit for experimenting with automation using a computer. Only slight downside is, some items in manual are left unclear (i.e. Digital Output Ports), but with a bit of initiative, and Google, these can easily be rectified. Shipped with a GUI to send and receive information from the card, but also a Windows DLL that programmers can easily integrate into their projects regardless of Programming Language. DLL contains programmer-friendly function names, and works brilliantly.

This is a great board and is certainly easy to program, however it is somewhat limited by the fact that you need it tethered to the PC for it to work. There are much better alternatives available now, such as the Arduino or Netduino boards which can be run as standalone devices untethered from a host PC.

This a great board as it enables you to interface the computer with real world devices. I board the ready assembled one as I don't have that much free time and i prefer to work on programming it rather than building it. For some time I have been looking for easy ways to interface the K8055 with Excel to use it with Excel VBA. This provides the advantage of Excel to use as a data log store and you can build a control interface using Excel formula logic. I have not found a way of doing this using the standard DLL but I thought I would offer my discovery of an ActiveX component that you can embed into an Excel worksheet and use this to interface with the USB card. The ActiveX component is the IOGateway from Industrial Might and Logic Ltd. This software component has been around for some time, it costs approx $30US, but has enabled me to do more or less what I wanted to do given that I don't know any programming languages apart from various flavours of Microsoft VBA. The component needs to install iteslf on the host computer, you need to enable Excel macros, and then you need to set a reference to it in the VBA editor. After that it follows a fairly standard VBA object model that I was able to work out by trial and error. If anyone is interested to know more I will write a description of the project setup and share a copy of the Excel workbook I have developed as a hobby project. It currently contains a data logging program that records the inputs in an Excel data table format and it has a Halloween project which triggers various outcomes in respone to any of the 5 inputs being triggered. I have used it to contol relays connected to props, LEDs, and to play a random worksheet embedded media files. The latter was fun connected to some outdoor speakers so that when someone arrived at the door they broke a light beam that turned on a strobe light and played a random Halloween sound. A questionable use of time but good fun working it all out. I have also posted this on the Velleman forum which is well worth a visit to provide advice on how to get the most out of this device.