Get Scale Weight into Web App

Question

I want to make a web app that weighs a load on a scale hooked up to a serial port. I would like to make this a web app. How would I go about getting the RS232-interfaced scale into the web app? I am using PHP and Codeigniter.

Answer 1

Unless the driver for the scale looks like a keyboard to the system (and that seems unlikely), you are going to have to implement an embeddable object on your web page that can access system resources. A Flash application might be able to do that, but I'm not certain.

Answer 2

You can't do this using PHP. This could MAYBE be done using a client side programming language. Javascript wouldn't work either. Server side programming languages don't have access to the user's computer serial ports.

This might have been a terrible explanation. But you get the point.