ok, I dont know if this belongs here, but I'm sure people in this forum should know.

Today, I was thinking of a way to get a single spark plug and injector to fire on there own, without an engine or ecu for a little project I'm working on

basically, back in highschool we did a class project where we hooked up 8 LED's to the parallel port (DB25) and wrote a program to flash the numbers 1-100 in binary using the LED's.
I was just thinking, that ECU's are nothing really more than computers with a big *** serial port connected to everything.
say, if i was to hook up a coil pack to a serial port instead of to the ECU where it usally goes and write a program to output 12v to that pin 10 times a second, think it would fire the coil?
also, same goes for a fuel injector.