So wish I could. Absolutely love being under water.

Can you. Sure, it’s an Arm based cpu. But you may have to put in some work to make things function correctly.

https://linuxvox.com/blog/best-arm-linux-distro/ is a good place to start.

As stated the outlet should be protected by GFCI so the moisture causing a short circuit or a personal electrical hazard shouldn’t be an issue.

However from a humidity standpoint with the electronic components, most company’s will say something to the effect of no more that a certain humidity operating environment. Using the plug in the bathroom could theoretically shorten the life of the plug or cause undesirable operation.

If you own your home you may be able to get one of the in the wiring box controllers like the Sonoff ZBMINIR2’s and use that to switch the outlet. This will absolutely depend on a couple factors and I am not an electrician. I also haven’t worked with the GFCI outlets much but regular outlets can have the plugs separated with one of them being always on and the other being switched. I have split an outlet and will probably do something similar in some others and plan to have one in my bathroom for charging my toothbrush and shaver. With the cover in place there should be little to no change in humidity in the box.

I am using AFCI/GFCI breakers on all bedroom and wet location circuits so it’s not an issue for me. That is also an option since you would still keep the required protection and be able to use an old school outlet. I’ve seen and replaced the GFCI outlets that begin to catch fire when they are heavily loaded, I also wonder if they die seemingly for no reason due to bathroom humidity getting inside through the prong openings. Either way using the breakers let’s me use the heavy duty outlets in the bathroom since ladies and their hair tools have no issues with the outlets being loose all the time and they are rated for a full 20 amps for the flame throwing hair dryer.

I’m still here and kicking.

Reminds me of my buddy. He had cancer but loved me so much. He kept me going when my wife died.

Maybe that’s a thing where you area at then. I’ve worked with heating units that have a simple temp probe and a manual dial that I converted to be “smart” by taking the outdoor temperature into account and then ramp the supply temperature up as the outdoor temp went down. This was a system that supplied hot water to radiators in an apartment building that was converted from a hotel. We replaced a pair of steam engine sized steam boilers to a direct fire hot water system by replacing the steam to water heat exchanger.

EVERY system I’ve worked on was the same, short the wires and it turns on. Anything beyond that is controlled by the heating unit. A simple thermostat just puts in the call by allowing the power to flow. When a system had multiple wires i.e. Heat and Cool plus fan you have 4 or more wires depending on the system capabilities. One supplies power or ground the others control fan, heat, or cool by being shorted to the power or ground wire. Sometimes there are multiple stages that are controlled by the thermostat sometimes they are controlled by the HVAC units built in controller. But MILLIONS of homes and businesses in the US work in a similar fashion and even without a thermostat installed a tech can short the needed wires and make them work.

https://home.howstuffworks.com/home-thermostat.htm

The power being provided to the unit is just a side effect. More than likely 24vdc and a set of contacts. If you were to wire a simple toggle switch in and flip it on the heat would turn on.

I’ve dealt with hundreds of thermostats they all work in a similar fashion the new ones just use multiple relays with a single power wire. The old school thermostats just used bimetal contacts or clock springs with a mercury relay. Modern ones use electromechanical or solid state relays. This includes things like the nest thermostats.

An ESP8266 running ESPHome and a relay would work here. It’s basically on or off. Then you could pull temperature information in from multiple temp sensors around your home.

I do something similar for some solar air heaters I built.

HomeAssistant will run on a Raspberry pi just fine but don’t expect to run a bunch of add-ons that way and things like Frigate with a few cameras will not work very well. So if you are not sure what you will be running in the future a mini pc is a good idea then you can install most any add-ons you like. The only thing you will need to pickup is a USB adapter for zigbee, z-wave, matter, or Bluetooth and if you decide to run cameras a Google Coral for object detection. You can run HomeAssistant using Docker however you will need to manage this much more than using HAOS. Unless you really want to deal with nitty gritty stuff you will lyrically want to use the HAOS version, https://community.home-assistant.io/t/home-assistant-installation-methods/207703

While HomeAssistant has features for automatically doing things you will probably want to install NodeRed for more complex automations. It’s well worth it especially if you want something randomized. I use it to select my porch RGB LED strip sequences randomly as well as my RGB LED address light sequence. They come on automatically at sundown and change or turn off at specific times throughout the evening. The porch strip changes to a bright white when a motion sensor is triggered or when a tracked device comes into the home zone.

I started of using 100% wifi based this and built all of my sensors based on ESP8266’s and ESP32’S using ESPHome. I’ve recently started adding zigbee since flashing stuff over is getting more difficult/nearly impossible outside of a few wifi based devices. I actually started using Sonoff ZBMINIR2’s for switches and plugs, the “switch” legs on the ZBMINIR2 can accept high voltage but when wired through a switch alone they are only 5v dc so I’ve used a couple to make in line cord switches with some simple push buttons in a hobby box for some lights I have. I’ve also installed them in receptacle boxes and turned a single outlet into a zigbee switched one. I’m using a sonoff zigbee dongle-e with ZHA as my coordinator and so far is been working perfectly.

Adding a zigbee device using ZHA is as simple as opening up HomeAssistant going to the settings/devices/zigbee and clicking on add device. Set the name and location and you are done unless you need to change a setting in the device. The ZBMINIR2’s by default are setup to work with toggle switches but can be used with intermittent pulse buttons as well by just changing a setting for the particular device.

My RGB LED strips are controlled using ESP32’s and WLED. My front porch strip is u hay under 1500 individual pixels and my address numbers are about 100.

I currently track my power usage with ESPHome on an ESP32 with CircuitSetup’s split phase energy meter kit. But hopefully in the next couple months I will have an Enphase system in place that will handle the majority of that along with solar production. I also have a simple water meter with a pulse output connected to an ESP8266 that feeds data into HomeAssistant as well.

If you are looking for premade sensors you can find a ton of different ones that are available for zigbee or z-wave but if there is something special you want search what ESPHome supports and add them in. I actually track vehicle battery voltage at home using an ESP8266 and ESPHome.

One of the potential issues if you live in town with a lot of WiFi AP’s around you is that some of the zigbee channels can overlap with WiFi frequencies in the upper 2.4ghz range (channel 11 mainly) so that can cause some issues with stuff that is further from your coordinator, however many zigbee devices when hooked to mains power will also act as relays so it’s simple enough to add a ZBMINIR2 to a switch at an in between point. I’ve honestly never had an issue and I run multiple WiFi AP’s in my own home and have neighbors with a couple routers. Z-wave is not the same but I believe the devices run a bit more and z-wave is a part of the matter/thread ecosystem and has a much longer range (up to 800 meters) but runs slower as it’s in the 900mhz range. I highly suggest taking a look at the protocols and compare them for your particular needs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Wave#Comparison_to_other_protocols

A small note about long range wireless signals. Having something that can operate 800 meters away since great, but remember there will be someone who also thinks it may be fun to try and hack stuff and the further your signal reaches the more chances it will be spotted. Years ago I used to encourage people to secure their ap’s by changing the SSID to something very colorful and change the passwords.

I actually started using HomeAssistant on TrueNAS Core a few years ago. From my understanding the best way to do this now it’s to use the TrueNAS X86-64 ISO in a VM. The TrueNAS docker system seems to be integrated differently than a standard docker installation on an os like Debian.

If you really want to keep using docker on TrueNAS you should create users with unique ID’s in TrueNAS and give them permission to access the needed resources. Those ID’s also need to match the user in the Docker container.

I personally use HomeAssistant on an Odroid N2+ and haven’t made the switch to TrueNAS Scale so I can’t be much help beyond that.

I’m rewiring my house so have started installing Sonoff ZBMINIR2 on one in certain locations. My outlets are being put in boxes large enough for a pair of double outlets (total of four individual plugs) so making one switched is kinda easy. Just wired it up without any switch at all and stuffed it in the box. Just have to break the tab on the positive side and wire the unswitched outlet as usual. I then get three always on outlets and one zigbee switched outlet, I’m going to create a label for the face plate front to show the switched one and the back side had the breaker and branch location info so it will be easy to figure out later on if needed.

I tested a couple of the ZBMINIR2’s switched side and if you bring power and ground through the ZBMINIR2 the switched contacts are only about 6v dc. The only disadvantage I have seen so far is that when a switch is wired up and rapidly turned on and off it goes into pairing mode so kids flipping switches are a bad thing but it’s easy enough to pair back up if you have your phone handy when it happens.

Dealt with something similar with my rgb bulbs in my bedroom. Flashed ESPHome on the bulbs and since they were on light switches I set them to come on as a shortcut. Need the light on and don’t have your phone? Just flip the switch off then back on. Have a power flicker or an outage you get bright lights from 7 rgb bulbs set to full blast. Wake up to burn your retinas bright light at random times of the night.

I use the bulbs as a wakeup sequence that shows weather via color and temperature as well. Then some others light up in order 25% every couple minutes. Then turn off after a certain amount of time. If I sleep through it I’m generally sick or that tired and need the extra rest, I use my phone’s alarm function for the have to be up and moving fallback.

Sorry. I’m just passing the information along. I would suggest contacting the Open Home Foundation. https://www.openhomefoundation.org/

For the money the Samsung A9+ is tough to beat IMHO.

11 inch touch screen in a slim package. Get a cheap jelly case run a couple screws into the wall, slip the tablet in place, route a charging cable.

No matter what you buy or build it will eventually be obsolete and need to be replaced. A decent tablet will last around 8 to 10 years as a wall mounted dashboard. The A9+ can be found for around 170 right now and the next prime sale will likely see it around 150. So that’s around 15 to 20 per year of use and all you need to do is either install the HomeAssistant app or setup Fully Kiosk.