On the SitePoint PHP blog Christopher Pitt is back with another tutorial showing you yet another "odd" use of PHP. In this latest post he shows you how to integrate PHP and an Arduino to relay Twitter and Gmail notifications.

I am a little obsessed with Twitter. It’s how I communicate with most of the developers I’m not fortunate to live in the same city as. I’m a little less obsessed with IoT projects, but then it’s harder to find the time to work on them than it is to check Twitter.

Unless I can do both at the same time.

Ever since the IoT week, I’ve been meaning to work on a project that will let me know when someone wants to speak to me. Something that looks cool, and is at the same time non-invasive. This is what I’ve come up with...

He connects the Arduino with a RBG LED and a a proximity sensor to a PHP script that will change the LED color based on the notification type. The sensor would allow some "hand waving" to dismiss the notification as "read". He then starts in on the hardware side of things including some illustrations of the Arduino board and how things connect. With that simple setup in place he moves over to the software side, creating a Notifier service interface and using the "endroid/twitter" package to connect over to Twitter. He then walks through the creation of the Gmail and Twitter applications, grabbing the related OAuth credentials and dropping them into the script's configuration file. He builds out notifier classes for each service and hooks it into the Arduino with the Firmata and Carica libraries. Finally he hooks it all together with a bit of SPLQueue functionality to loop and listen for new alerts to relay to the Ardunio.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial from author Andrew Carter showing you how you can use the Raspberry Pi hardware to power a PHP-based application with a bit of simple setup.

A Raspberry Pi is a brilliant tiny computer that you can power off of a micro USB cable. The most recent model has WiFi, an ethernet port, 4 USB ports and an HDMI port. There’s also a micro SD card slot, which is where the “hard drive” goes.

It’s capable of running Raspbian Linux, which is a Debian based Linux distribution. This makes it familiar to Ubuntu users who can then just sudo apt-get install all the things. Like with any Linux machine, you can install PHP on it and make a website – but we can do so much more than that!

He starts with the equipment you'll need to follow along with the tutorial - a recent Raspberry Pi model with wifi and a bit of other electronics equipment (he also recommends a starter kit for those new to this hardware world). Once the Pi is set up, he then installs PHP via an apt-get package install along with the PiPHP: GPIO library that makes working with the input/output simpler via PHP. He then shows the wiring you'll need to do to get a LED and button connected. A simple script is included that sets up a watcher on the button input and, when the "push" event is fired, it blinks the LED five times.

He finishes the post with a look at some of his own testing and preparation for a talk on this same subject with some slightly humorous results.

Every once and a while someone uses PHP for something interesting and different than the usual web application. In this post to his site Thomas Weinert shares an example - he uses PHP to control a LED via Carica Chip.

Some time ago, in this blog post, I explained the basic stuff about Arduino, Firmata and PHP. Now it is time for the next step. Carica Io and Carica Firmata have grown and got a third layer called Carica Chip. [...] Carica Chip provides an easy way to control a device. So let's start with an "Interactive LED" example.

He uses the Carica Chip library and the "skeleton" application command from Composer to make a basic application. A simple HTML page with on and off links is made and and basic Carica Chip server is set up and executed. It's a simple example, but it gives you an idea of how to set it all up. The Carica Chip package also allows for other interactions including working with servos and motors.

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.

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).

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.

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).