> Some of these seem overengineered. Oh for sure. Normally I'd throw the Hue automation software on my home server, but it's busy with other stuff. Other tha

> Some of these seem overengineered. Oh for sure. Normally I'd throw the Hue automation software on my home server, but it's busy with other stuff. Other than that, for the other stuff I listed, I would have said the same a few years ago and opted for ESPs, Arduinos, STM32s, or some other "lightweight" solutions. But the Pi has gotten to this nice sweet spot now that they've got WiFi built-in and most of the rough edges are gone. They can do almost everything the other solutions can do, and for the things they can't you can buy HATs that fill in the gaps. So it's just nice to have one big, universal hammer that I can pull out for my crazy projects. Most importantly, I don't like wasting time any more, and I'm willing to spend a couple tens of bucks on RasPis that might be overkill, rather than save X dollars making the best, slimmest, most engineered solution around the perfect STM32 chip.