Reading from Serial port - having trouble

I'm just an amateur who has taken on the project of building an arduino powered robot to be controlled via web.

I have about 3 days(!) experience with php and in that time managed to get a serial port control class written by Remy Sanchez and have set up some basic communication between the Arduino and a php script.

So far doing pretty well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-p_jI98zZU"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-p_jI98zZU

I'm able to send data to the serial port (though it's not working consistently...if I send a "C" to the serial port in php it doesn't get picked up by the Arduino but using the same exact code it works fine if I send a letter "D".


I'm not able to read data at all from the serial port. I have the simple scripts below:

<?php
/* Script for testing receipt of data from Arduino */

	// Load the serial port class
	require("php_serial.class2.php");

	//Initialize the class

	$serial = new phpSerial();

	$serial->deviceSet("COM4");
	
	$serial->confBaudRate(9600);
	$serial->confParity("none"); 
	$serial->confCharacterLength(8); 
	$serial->confStopBits(1);  

	$serial->deviceOpen();

	$read = $serial->readPort(); // waiting for reply
	$led1 = $read;
	$led1 = (int)$led1;
	
	$serial->deviceClose();

?>

Code (markup):

ARduino:

// testing output to php
const int ledPin = 2;

  
 void setup()
 {
   Serial.begin(9600);
 }

 void loop()
{
   Serial.println("1");  //_control);
   
   digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);
   delay(50);
   digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);
   delay(100);
}  

Code (markup):

 

Cool project! Is this really the right forum for help though?

Have you tried Googling about the php_serial class you're using? Where did you get it from?

 

I have tried...that's pretty much what led me to this site as there was an earlier reference to it but not related to this problem.

Why wouldn't this forum be appropriate?