So we settled on using a Rapsberry Pi as out base station. To use this for our project we need to get some knowledge about this device. We just used it as a media centre so far.

We stated with control the GPIO. We have experience with writing Arduino and C/C++ code so we wanted to control them that way. We stumbled upon the WiringPi library. This gave us control over the GPIO with Arduino/C/C++ like commands. We can edit the files on Pi itself or on our PC's and upload them using a FTP program like FileZilla.

Next was our database. A friend of mine studies Computer Engineering and he said that mySQL was a clean and simple solution. It's easy to set up and maintain and can be integrated with almost everything. We use the database to switch I/O bases on the data. A website or app could access this database to change values and the Pi would react to this. For managing the database you can use phpMyadminwhich can be accessed using a ip adress and php file.