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Super easy to power a Pi from DC only. Many (most) USB ports will work (the amperage draw can be a bit much for some older lighter-style USB power adapters).

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.

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Appreciate the reply. It looks like there's a bunch of sensors I can hook up to the pi as well. Again, really appreciate you sharing this!

There are some great sensor options out there and they are dirt cheap (cents or a couple of dollars). ESP32 and ESP8266 are my chips of choice and they are also very cheap.

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.

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