laravel4cookbook

Embedded Systems 303
the message event listener, the return values will be received and reflected in the sensor input field.
Spinning Up
To connect to the Arduino, you should run the following command:
1 php artisan embedded:serve /dev/cu.usbmodem1411
On my system, the Arduino is reflected as /dev/cu.usbmodem1411 by this may differ on yours. For
instance, my Ubuntu machine shows it as /dev/ttyACM0. The easiest way to find out what it is, is
to unplug it, then run the following command:
1 ls /dev/tty*
Look over the list to familiarise yourself with the devices you see there. The plug the Arduino in,
wait a couple seconds and run that command again. This time you should see a new addition to the
list of devices. This is most likely your Arduino.
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You may be wondering why my device starts with cu and not tty. I first tried the tty version of
the Arduino and it would cause the server to hang. I experimented and found that the cu version
let me connect and communicate with the Arduino. Go figure…
I usually like to include Vagrant configurations for running these projects. This time I found it
confusing to try and communicate with an Arduino through the host machine. So instead I decided
to try the server.php script bundled with Laravel applications. Turns out you can run the server with
the following command:
1 php -S 127.0.0.1:8080 -t ./public server.php
Now you can go to http://127.0.0.1:8080 and see the interface we created earlier. You need to start
the serve command successfully before this interface will work. If everything is running correctly,
you should immediately start to see the sensor values being updated in the interface.
You can now adjust the LED input to control the brightness of the LED, and the x and y inputs to
control the rotation of the servos.
Adding A Webcam
Streaming video from a web cam can be tricky, so we’re going to take time-lapse photos instead…