I have a fair amount of Arduino coding experience and can assure you this is pretty easy… What I don’t have is Particle Photon experience, but the whole point of the Particle Photon system is that it provides a rather easy to use cloud layer over top of typical Arduino coding.
I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to do a hands-on project with Photon, but the lazy answer is that @keithcroshaw (and a few others before him?) built a SmartThings integrated blind tilting project with Photon and could at least point you in the right direction. Send him a PM and/or check out his project…
It’s a long thread, so browse around until you find the latest code.
But frankly … I wouldn’t be surprised if the code in the first mentioned GitHub is a not a bad starting point…
(P.S.: If you have a budget for co-operative custom development; Private Message me. We can work over Skype and I have Photons to build with.)