To be honest, if I were doing this project again I’d do it slightly differently because, as you’re finding, the way I’ve done it is not very flexible.

To have both incremental and toggle controls for a single device could be achieved (in a fairly hackish way) using JavaScript. If you had two drop-down menus, inc_dropdown with values 0, 25, 50, …, 255 and toggle_dropdown with 0 and 255:


var myValue;
$(document).ready(function(){
$('#inc_dropdown, #toggle_dropdown').change(function(){myValue = $(this).val();});
$('#submit').click(function(){
ping($('#l').val(), myValue);
return false;
});
});


What that would do (hopefully, it’s untested) is set the value of the variable ‘myValue’ to that of whichever of the two drop-downs was changed last. The ping() function is then given ‘myValue’ as a parameter instead of the value of any single form control. I hope that makes sense…

Regarding status reports – it’s been well over a year since I had this actually set up and running, but if I recall correctly I did have trouble getting the PHP Serial class to reliably receive data from the Arduino. The ‘status’ div is meant to be empty though – it’s populated using JavaScript. I can’t really think why it wouldn’t be working for you though.

Sorry if this hasn’t been a very helpful message!

Ok, I’ve got the communication working and the lights are turning on! Unfortunately, I’m not getting any status reports. I noticed that in index.php, there’s nothing in the “status” div, is that ok?

In addition, I’d like to add another form that just has the options on and off for two of the ports. I tried simply copying and editing, but it seems to only work if it’s in that original form, any suggestions? Here’s the HTML for the form currently:

I’m using this for a Power controller hence the random appliance names.

Thanks for your help!

It’s an encouraging sign that the Arduino’s TX/RX lights are blinking when you send the signal. To me that suggests that although it’s receiving the packet, it’s not being interpreted as a valid set of values.

To test this I would strip the Arduino code back to basics – have it turn on the LED regardless of what character(s) are received, i.e.:

if(Serial.available() > 0){
analogWrite(9,255);
}
(replace 9 with the pin your LED’s attached to)

If that works, then it’s probably a problem with the packet system – either PHP’s not encoding it right, or the Arduino isn’t interpreting it correctly.

Good luck! Please feel free to ask more questions.

I have everything setup now including Apache and have auto-reset disable using a 110 ohm resistor. However I still cannot get the LED’s to turn on. I edited my serial port address in serial.php and downloaded the other two files needed and put them in the correct directory but it has yet to function. With the jquery library, do you download the compressed, uncompressed, or minified versions? I downloaded the uncompressed and then renamed it as jquery.js as is referenced. Perhaps that’s where I went wrong?

The arduino tx and rx lights blink when I send the signal, but nothing happens. Any suggestions?

The PHP was indeed hosted on the built-in Apache server on my Mac.

The iPod doesn’t perform any other function other than as a web-browser. It’s connected, via Wi-Fi, to the LAN my Mac’s on. Then I just point Safari to http://computername.local to see the Apache hosted files.

The serial port to use is defined in the PHP code, which uses the PHP Serial class to do the actual communication.

I hope that answers your questions.

Thanks,

Tinlad