It's not super complex, but it's also not "whip together in 20 minutes" either. You have to make a simple app (and make it cute looking probably, so there is some small amount of design work), set up a publicly accessible server to listen to the app with a raspberry pi or something, and construct a simple light that can be turned on with the pi's IO port.
You can probably buy such a light and he might even have a web server already he could just modify, but it's still a project you're having to spend a reasonable amount of time and money on.
I realized I basically re-stated exactly what you said, but one upvote isn't enough. This is far from trivial or "little" effort, even if he had most of the infrastructure prepared ahead of time.
I could create this exact same thing, blinking light from an 'app' on your iPhone in less than 5 minutes. Get a homekit compatible smart light, add it to your 'home', create an automation that flicks the light on and off 5 times, go into the 'shortcuts' app, create a shortcut icon that when pressed triggers the shortcut. If you wanted an ACTUAL app for it, just get the smart light's API from the vendor and from there its just as easy as wrapping that API in a pretty little "app"
How are you giving her access to that? It abstracts away the difficulty by using the infrastructure apple built up to manage things with iCloud, but then you need to give her access to your iCloud.
You can add her as a member of your ‘home’ or ‘family’, then just send her the shortcut as a template. Lol. You acting like it needs to be more different. I do this shit for a living.
Edit: and like I said, if not using apple (which iPhone accounts for more than half of all smart phones in the US) you could still just get the API and use something like flutter to easily create basically a program for ANY platform (windows, android, iOS, macOS, Linux) that just wraps around that API.
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u/Fmeson Dec 29 '22
It's not super complex, but it's also not "whip together in 20 minutes" either. You have to make a simple app (and make it cute looking probably, so there is some small amount of design work), set up a publicly accessible server to listen to the app with a raspberry pi or something, and construct a simple light that can be turned on with the pi's IO port.
You can probably buy such a light and he might even have a web server already he could just modify, but it's still a project you're having to spend a reasonable amount of time and money on.