I don't know much about electronics or coding drivers, but it's something that would be fun to learn. Or if there's something premade that will do what I want, then that will do too. Basically what I want to do is a remote button that has a LED on it, when I push the button, through USB it would run a linux shell script on my server, the script would then tell the device to turn the LED on. When the script is done, it would tell the device to turn the LED off. How hard would this be to do? I'm hoping to use ether USB or Ethernet. Either way, it will travel over my Ethernet network. If I use USB then I will be using one of those converter boxes to go over Ethernet. What I want to use this for is my backups. I will have a seperate HDD docking station where I put a drive on and turn it on. I would then push the separate button which would tell the server to start the backup job. To indicate it was successful to start (ex: drive mounted successfully) the LED would turn on. When the job is done, the LED would turn off, indicating that it is ok to turn off the drive. This would be situated in my bedroom while the server is in the basement.
Sorry about your situation, I wish there was a better option for you. I don't have the detailed answers for you, but there are usually support clinics in the city you live in. They help you with that sort of stuff, and usually an abortion won't cost anything if you go through them.