PHPDeveloper.org http://www.phpdeveloper.org Up-to-the Minute PHP News, views and community en-us Thu, 20 Nov 2008 06:29:30 -0600 30 <![CDATA[NewsForge: Real world control from a Web page]]> http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5426 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5426 If you've ever wanted yout scripts to do something more "outside the box" and out in the real world, you might want to check out this new tutorial from NewsForge for a good start.

In "Acquiring data from the physical world" we examined how to use a microcontroller to turn physical events (such as reading a switch) into data and send that data to a Linux box via the serial line. With this capability you can do things like counting people passing through a gate or recording how the temperature changes over time in a factory process. You can then send the data to a Web page. In this article, we'll do it in reverse -- from a Web form, instruct a microcontroller to perform some actions

The concept's pretty simple - the form they build submits back to the page and writes the input out to a file. This file is then read by the controller for the LED they have connected and, with the proper input, will turn it on and off. The code for the PHP/web side of things is included, but it might take a little work to get the rest of the hardware interfaced (as the author saw as well).

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