Raspberry Pi Forums

Hello I am very new to programming with a pi. My goal is to create a smart lock door and control it with an android app through a raspberry pi 3 and the wifi. There will be lots of different functionality in the design, nfc access, wifi access, camera control and picture/video database and we are are still brainstorming more features.

I am beginning to write the app using Android Studio, which is written in Java on a Mac, and I want to figure out the best way to control the raspberry with the app. The research I have came up with is setting up a web server on the pi, and then using the server to control it. Meaning I would have buttons and other functionality within the app linked to a web address that is linked to the pi.

Let me know what you think, and if you have any advice. Thanks.

If you are using a web-server on the Pi, why not just make a web-page and skip (or postpone) the whole Android part for now.

It depends a bit on which parts you want to start with, but it seems you have a lot of Raspberry Pi things to do (and learn) so why muck about with android phones.

Alternatives to making a pure web-server (and probably PHP) is to use something like node-red ( Javascript ) or look into MQTT as possible way of communicating between phone and RPi.

Yeah I guess I was looking for alternatives of communicating both the hardware and the phone. Yes I saw something about skipping the app and just writing a webpage but I really would like to make a app, also this will be my first app. I see it as an opportunity to improve my programming skills which I needed. Up for the challenge.

Will definitely look into nodes and open to different approaches. I am just researching at this point. Since I am using android studio for my app which is written in Java and I believe the raspberry pi 3 comes with python, will this cause problems? I understand most projects will require multiple types of languages interacting with one another for the different functionalities desired but is there recommended or avoid preferences?

For the app activity interface I want to start out with a unlock toggle button, a notification log and custom alerts, a camera database of snapshots, and creating some sort of cloud storage. Thoughts?

The solution to deal with different architectures and languages is to use protocols that is well supported in different languages.
So using HTTP and/or Websockets or MQTT should be mostly language independent.

But Raspberry Pi comes with a whole lot of programming languages already installed, you are not limited to Python in any way.