

It’s IoT Week at SitePoint! All week we’re publishing articles focused on the intersection of the internet and the physical world, so keep checking the IoT tag for the latest updates.

A whole week of mostly IoT resources on every channel and, yes, that includes PHP. What? “PHP and IoT!? Surely you’re mistaken!”, you must be thinking. No, dear reader. PHP and IoT go well together – better than one might expect.

In this post, we’ll list some getting started resources. Throughout the remainder of the week, we’ll have some amazing hands on posts for you – everything from creating a drinks machine with PHP, to a real life alarm when a door in Minecraft opens (yes, really!) – and that’s just on our channel. Be sure to check out the others, too!

Without further ado, here’s some introductory material for you if you feel like dabbling before we dive in properly!

Hardware

Electronic Components: when starting out, it’s sometimes difficult to know how to use electronic components, or how to plug them into a circuit. This little guide by the excellent Christopher Pitt is helpful for figuring out a handful of common components.

Arduino: a neat hobbyist development platform. It abstracts the steps from resisters and wires to functional computation. You program Arduino boards using C/C++, and this guide will fill in the details to get you started…

Onion IoT: a hardware platform like Arduino, but allegedly more flexible and more language agnostic, in that it also supports PHP. The devices and addons are fairly cheap, and very easy to mix and match with other hardware, from generic electronics to Arduinos.

Intel Developer Zone Hardware Store: Intel’s developer zone contains a nice catalogue of hardware designed specifically for IoT. Well, not really – it’s just your general purpose electronics – but all bundles together into one store focused on IoT. So if ordering online is more your forte, this is the place to get equipped.

Gas sensors: when I was in grade school, I built a breathalyzer with LEDs showing the alcohol level for a competition. Those were arguably simpler times for building stuff, but it was much, much more complicated to find proper hardware. These days, things are reverse – the hardest part to find was a gas based resistor sensor, and that’s exactly what sites like these have to offer.

Software and Tutorials

What next?

Now that you’re equipped to get started, go ahead and dabble. Think of ideas, imagine scenarios, and go out to your electronics store to get a $10 fistful of hardware – by the time you’re back, we’ll have plenty of hands-on tutorials for you.

Have any more resources that might fit into this list? Let us know in the comments, and happy IoTing!