[xconverge]

Your math checks out. For me I came to different sums for each bullet point primarily starting at the place of "I do/did enjoy setting it up as a hobby". I also really liked maturing my solutions from a this is fun to hack together, to things my partner actually has said "wow this is actually pretty nice I like it".

I have also been very impressed with some of the infrastructure/solutions that the open source community has available, it is a pretty rich infrastructure that is not unbearably-brittle if you know what you are doing, but definitely is not user friendly enough to be easy to recommend to everyone.

[boringg]

Thanks for the ideas - I think that's how I would have to approach it as well in that I would really want to further explore the possibilities of IoT. I've done some in the past for home energy systems but past energy I haven't seen a lot of high value opportunities. Certainly some things that could be smoother (like your projects).

[brimble]

Yeah, I totally get that it works out differently for different people. Maybe I'm just getting old enough that I can smell when I'm looking at something that's gonna become an excuse to spend money, more than anything else ("well now that I have an X, if I just had an Y...") But if I truly enjoyed it as a hobby, different story.