Automation without the necessity of human intervention has been a key component of our design from the start. We chose to use Raspberry Pis as our control system, for their relatively small scale but large operating capacity, ability to interface directly with electronic components, and ubiquity of technical support.
We initiated a GitHub repository and began working on the code base. The majority is written in C, due to its speed and universality. We are, of course, using Linux as the operating system, for obvious reasons.
We soon wrote a GPIO library to interface directly with the electronic subsystems, and a control system, however we also ran into a roadblock. Our limited prior experience (and the majority of documentation we could locate) focused on the old Linux gpiomem interface, however in recent versions that has been replaced with the gpiochip interface, which is considerably more difficult to use without the aid of a bloated third-party library. It is unclear whether we are energizing the wrong pin or our request is not being completed at all. We hope to resolve this issue soon.