Thomas Weinert continues his series looking at merging the physical and virtual using PHP to with messages coming from servers and how to build it into a sensor phalanx.

Sensors are fun. They report from the physical world into the digital. But getting the signal into php is only the first part, you will have to get them out again. This post shows how to get data from analog sensors pushed to the browser. It uses Carica Chip, if you haven't read my previous blog post you should do it first.

He talks about the use of ReactPHP in the Carica library and the addition of Ratchet to help with the websocket messaging. He sets up two simple servers - one HTTP, the other websocket - to handle the reporting and interaction with the sensor. He includes the code for the HTTP server and uses his example code to make the phalanx listening on 8081. Some other code is included to make the listeners and the simple UI for the charts. A video is included showing it all in action, reacting to a moving light.