Im a trying to make an automated light switch. To do this I am using a stepper motor. The goal is for the me to be able to access my raspberry pi from a browser and using 2 simple buttons, "Turn on" and "Turn off", control the motor which will turn the light switch. I have written this simple python script to turn the motor, which has been tested from the Pi and works perfectly. It is called stepper.py and it is located in /var/www/html:
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD)
control_pins = [7,11,13,15]
for pin in control_pins:
GPIO.setup(pin, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.output(pin, 0)
halfstep_seq = [
[1,0,0,0],
[1,1,0,0],
[0,1,0,0],
[0,1,1,0],
[0,0,1,0],
[0,0,1,1],
[0,0,0,1],
[1,0,0,1]
]
for i in range(256):
for halfstep in range(8):
for pin in range(4):
GPIO.output(control_pins[pin], halfstep_seq[halfstep][pin])
time.sleep(0.001)
GPIO.cleanup()
print "Motor Rotation Completed"
Also in /var/www/html I have an index.html and index.php pages:
index.html:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" dir="ltr">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Smart Light Switch</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Smart Light Switch</h1>
<form action="index.php" method="post">
<input type="submit" name="on" value="Turn Lights On">
<input type="submit" name="off" value="Turn Lights Off">
</form>
</body>
</html>
index.php:
<?php
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == "POST" and isset($_POST['on']))
{
lightOn();
} elseif ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == "POST" and isset($_POST['off']))
{
lightOff();
}
function lightOn()
{
$command = escapeshellcmd('python stepper.py');
$output = shell_exec($command);
echo "Light Turned On";
}
function lightOff()
{
echo "Light Turned Off";
}
?>
Essentially the HTML just displays the 2 buttons and on the click it goes to the php file where the functions are successfully reached. However, the script to turn the stepper motor does not get executed. I have looked online and it would seem that what I have is the correct way to execute a python script from php, but it doesn't work.