David It should be possible to control GPIO pins without any problems. The most easiet way would be to run a Node javascript server on your PI, and then you could just start a webpage (just type the IP adress of your PI in your web browser) with button or whatever you need to set the GPIO pins.
There is alot of pre build packages out there, so this should be strait forward.
e.g https://www.npmjs.com/package/pi-gpio