Really cool. Could you point me towards any resources for learning the electronics side of this? I've had my pi for awhile and want to get into the hardware aspect of it more, but have zero experience.
I don't know too much about hardware, enough to solve simple issues like this. The relay simply closes the circuit as if I pressed the wall switch. The Pi has header pins with power, ground, and programmable pins. Check out the WiringPi page though. https://projects.drogon.net/raspberry-pi/wiringpi/