Wifly post autoconnect problem

Hello everyone!

I am on a university team for a NASA competition (Lunabotics) and my responsibility is to program an Arduino + Wifly to operate our excavator via a network connection. I got the Wifly shield to connect on its own using the alpha 1+2 sample code, however, I am stuck on what to do from there. The Roving Networks manual and most of the tutorials/discussions online are about how to connect the shield to a network but I have been unable to find any guidelines on how to actually control the Arduino and its pins once this has been accomplished.

I set up a simple LED/resistor combo to see if I could trip it based on sending a letter. I used an if statement conditional on Spiserial.read() == ‘J’ but sending over the letter J in Teraterm hasn’t done anything despite the fact that when I hit enter, the red light on the shield flashes indicating it is receiving data. Everyone I have talked to says something along the lines of it being a matter of reading the serial but I am lacking the actual command names and specific guidelines for controlling the Arduino once a connection has been made.

Can anyone please help me out? I would be grateful for any advice be it actual code suggestions, command names, links to tutorials, anything at all!

Thanks in advance guys,

Yusif Nurizade