PHP is one of the most accessible and commonly used languages in computer programming. It’s used for building websites, web applications, micro services and loads of other stuff. Normally we would not use it to control hardware. But let that be the showcase of this talk. I’ll show you how I (ab)used PHP to control hardware used during track and field competitions. It involves LED-panels, serial-to-ethernet-convertors and the use of reactphp, an event-driven non-blocking I/O library.