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).
