Robotic PHP

cicak-king

Join the wave for future. In this thread we will discuss how to run PHP to control parellel port.Even though i havnt figure it out,some early investigations have been undergone. These r my proposed solutions:
1) RUN c complier via PHP control
2) RUN VB applz using PHP ~new breakthough!
-if v can make this,i can foresee the destruction for ASP progammer
NOTE:forget bout java,asp for time being ok!

problems:
1) no any similar articles to be used as reff on the net (tellme if u found some)
2)PHP library for in/out control only availbable for Unix not Win based system.

Scopes
1) develop a control script for parallel port via PHP
2)script must be capble running on Win n Unix paltformed servers

Objectives
1)control robotic stuff using those signals
2)establising a purely web based controlled system for robotic stuff

Sgarissta

I've done exactly what you're attemping to do. The easiest solution I could come up with was to write about two 3 line QBasic programs. What to handle output, one to handle input. Then just shell out those commands from PHP.

You won't find an easy cross-platform solution because the parallel port IO is drastically different between Windows and Linux. In fact its drastically different in different versions of Windows.

The easiest cross platform way of doing it is writing an output/input program for linux, and one for windows. Then detecting in the script which OS you're on and call that file.

AstroTeg

I agree with Sgarissta. On Windows, you do have the option of using COM. And you could build a COM object to do your IO handling. But then you have the problem of *nix. For that, you would need to write an app for it (although it wouldn't be able to interface as cleanly as COM would).

I've got some X10 gear at home. Its controlled by a serial connection. Running from Linux, there's a command line tool that you can run. I have PHP issue an exec() to that command line tool and just change the command line parameters. It works well for what I need.

I've also played with parallel port gadgets. I created a C++ DOS app that could flip the data channels open and closed. This was enough to toggle reed switches open and closed which could drive 12v gadgets like fans and buzzers. That was fun to play with. I rigged it to a web page via several batch files. One to actually run the C++ program. One to monitor for a request. I think I had a batch file that just sat listening to see if a particular file got created (it was created by my PHP script and had the request info in it). Then when it found the file, it called my C++ program which knew to look for the file and would read the parameters in. This isn't glamorous, but with the tools I had available, it worked.

Sgarissta

I actually had an 8 port relay switch attached to the parallel port, that controlled about 16 1 hp or so motors. It was for our universities homecoming activities, and we'd built a large, "animatronic" type device, that needed precision timing (as opposed to what most do which is just put lag time in with larger gears, or rods).

I then used two QB exe's one to read the switch, one to write to it. Then i wrote a quick socket server in PHP to handle the IO, then whipped up a PHP/GTK client to connect to it. This way i could be in the yard on wireless, and turning motors on on and off 🙂