$10 is an awesome price point. I've never toyed with any of these, but i think i'll pick one up!
How long do you think it'll be before i can safely hook up powered electronics into a system like RasPi? I'd like to make my home "smart", but i don't want to have random IoT vulnerabilities in my home. So a simple network of tiny linux machines powering desk lights/etc will be plenty for me. However, hooking electronics up is dangerous, so i'd rather wait until a professional makes it accessible to someone like me.
Look into a protocol like z-wave - you can already get switches, outlets, heating controllers etc and it can be done without an internet connection. You can get a USB Z-Wave dongle[0] and then use Home Assistant [1] on a Pi to control everything.
Something like https://www.adafruit.com/products/2935 combined with a flavor of raspberry pi then. The linked product is barebones but the actually dangerous part has already been done for you.
I would get a Z-Wave daughter board and use Z-Wave devices for controlling the electronics. Z-wave devices aren't Internet connected so you only have to worry about locking down the Pi.
Apparently there's already an open source project called Home Assistant for this purpose.
How long do you think it'll be before i can safely hook up powered electronics into a system like RasPi? I'd like to make my home "smart", but i don't want to have random IoT vulnerabilities in my home. So a simple network of tiny linux machines powering desk lights/etc will be plenty for me. However, hooking electronics up is dangerous, so i'd rather wait until a professional makes it accessible to someone like me.
Thoughts?