After my previous school project ended, I decided to work more on it by myself. I learned a bit of PHP and server stuff so here it goes!
After delivering my school project, the teacher taught us the basics of HTML and PHP. As you might assume, I was already quite familiar with HTML and even a little JavaScript which I’ve used for some parts of my website.
During class, we learned how to detect POST requests and make a simple input box to set the degrees of a servomotor via the internet!
As far as I know PHP only works on the server side, and it can do quite a lot of stuff, like run other scripts and print its output.
So, I started to modify a script I had to print tables from a database, and I added HTML tags to every print function to make it a table.
After a few failed attempts, missing tags and some coding errors, I managed to make that work. And a nice table was displayed. I also added my website’s stylesheet!
Next, I wanted to be able to run specific sections of that python script based on which button was pressed, so I can allow cars to enter or exit the parking lot successfully.
For that, the easiest route for me would be using external arguments, that come when you run a command. For example, when you run cd /path/to/directory/ , the argument is the path you wanna go to. In my case, the arguments would be the action I wanna do, and in one of those actions I would also require the input of the user, to know which parking spot they are exiting from.
After messing around with Python, I was now able to recognize user input and update the page according to it thanks to arguments sent by PHP. That section looked like this!
The cool thing about this is that not only was I displaying all this information on the website, I also did stuff in the real world, my servo opened and closed, and I setup a speaker to output when there were no spots available, or in case you are entering, which spot you were assigned to use.
The PHP itself looked something like this. I placed it in different sections of the HTML, so the output appears where I want it to.
//If the car wants to enter
if($_POST['entrance'] and $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == "POST"){
$command = escapeshellcmd("sudo ./parking.py 2");
$output = shell_exec($command);
echo "$output";
}
// If the car wants to exit
if($_POST['space_num'] and $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == "POST"){
$v = $_POST['space_num'];
$command2 = escapeshellcmd("sudo ./parking.py 1 $v");
$output2 = shell_exec($command2);
echo "$output2";
}
# Runs every time the page loads
$command = escapeshellcmd("sudo ./database_output.py");
$output = shell_exec($command);
echo "$output <br>";
As you can tell, it is quite simple to get whats going on. Now you might be wondering whats inside of those python scripts, well, I made one to output the database contents in a table, as I mentioned, and another one is in charge of updating the database, playing output to a speaker and moving the servo to let cars in and out. Check it out if you want in its git repo
Let me know what do you think of my coding skills out of this! I think I took into account most of the plausible scenarios, but there might be some bugs still there.
I could explain these scripts but I was already unwilling to show them at all because of the mistakes I could have. Anyways, the point is I got a really cool project working that will probably be what we’ll learn during the following classes, but I am glad I got inspired to do this on my own! so I am happy about it.
