I think the RDS Sender is completely finished. Since the radio station doesn't actually have a radio that can receive RDS, the only way for us to know if it worked is to go out to the transmitter and look at the RDS encoder, or have David Cohen sit in his car and watch. This makes it pretty hard to get a good opportunity to test the program. Wednesday night David and I had a chance to try it out, but to our chagrin we couldn't get it to work. Some exploring on Thursday revealed that the program was generating a fatal error because when the PHP serial class attempted to execute "mode" to set the baud rate and other settings, it would claim that it was not a valid command. Despite being able to run the mode command from the terminal it still claimed it didn't exist. I tried changing it to the absolute path, but it still didn't work. As far as I can tell, PHP just doesn't have permission to execute the mode command, but then I would have expected to get a permission denied error. Either way, because we only use our serial port for one thing, we don't ever need to change any of the default settings, which means we never really need to try to run the mode command from PHP anyway. I commented out the section of code that tried to set the baud rate and such, and now I can run the script without getting an error. I assume this to mean that it works, but I can't really know until David Cohen is in his car. As soon as I've confirmed it working, I'll post the source and instructions for use. I'll leave in the commented out section of setting the baud rate in case anyone who uses it ever needs to change the settings and they give PHP permission to execute such commands.
As for the Remote Dump Panel, I've researched all the parts I think I'll need and the total comes to about $75. Once we get those ordered and they come in I'll keep the blog up to date with progress on the build.
