I'd love to use this for overnight drops from the hi n dry. The one thing I didn't see mentioned is powering the unit with DC-only. I'm a PI newbie and I don't run an AC inverter on board.
The power draw from our dedicated device (https://floathub.com/store) is much lower than a Pi, but you don't get the advantage of a general purpose computer that can run other stuff at the same time.
Some great projects are easily achievable from Arduino. It seems to be slightly looked down on as a platform, but I’m not skilled enough to know why. It has an IDE and a language that’s easy enough to use. There is also a huge community and a mass of projects out there. ESPHome is another excellent project which takes the coding down to just yaml config files and then you can makes automations one Home Assistant.
take a look in some of the subsections here: https://www.pololu.com/category/131/step-down-voltage-regula...