Unless I’m misunderstanding, I do believe it is that simple, yes.

I think the first decision to make is pre built vs DIY. The most common pre built solution would be something like Synology. You may start researching there and see if that would fit your needs, or what people do as alternatives.

I personally built one with a similar use case and use Unraid for my OS. The other normal option is TrueNAS.

With that budget you’ll be able to get a good result.

Honestly I’d just go low-ish tech and give them a key, or install a lock with a keypad and teach them a number. The security problems with automatic smart locks are too big, in my opinion.

For project A, I’d look into tailscale. I’d advise against having home assistant open to the internet otherwise.

Don’t know anything about your other project, sorry.

Yeah it’s relatively easy to reuse most webcam cameras, you just have to get them connected to a USB cable, then most computers will immediately recognize them as cameras.

I usually just harvest usable parts like the hard drive and camera and call it a day.

Alternatively, if you’re able to plug an external monitor in and get it to work for setup, you could install some sort of Linux distro on it and run it headless for lots of different purposes.

Thanks for answering! I’ll do some reading on how package managers work.

Noob question: lately I’ve been using flatpaks for most things because of the packaged dependencies. I am under the impression that as you add and remove programs over time, you’ll run into less issues with flatpak than with the distro package manager because the dependencies will come and go with the flatpaks and not sit in the host accumulating my mistakes. Am I wrong about this?

In vanilla home assistant? You can do sunrise and sunset but it’s not super reliable in my experience.

What does this allow you to do that can’t already be done with a date or time trigger in automations?

I’ve got a homemade NAS running unRAID and my arr suite/Jellyfin/qbittorrent, and an orangepi running the orangepiOS (flavor of Ubuntu I think?) Which handles home assistant and associated containers .

Yeah do it there is basically no downside. I agree with others that you may have trouble with the ads in streaming services. On my android TV, YouTube ads, for instance, aren’t blocked by pihole.

Yeah node red + the notification services on HA would definitely be how I do this. In fact, I kinda do already.

I use a fractal design node 304. It’s pretty cool, but has all the limitations and problems you would expect from a case that size.

This. I use zigbee2mqtt and there’s a lot of resources about what devices are supported.

If one wants the NAS functionality then yeah unRAID is great. If not I think they’d be served as well or better with Ubuntu and docker (ideally with portainer UI)

Why not proton drive?

Yeah I have an orangepi5 running pihole and a suite of home assistant related docker containers and it’s been working flawlessly. Even has an m.2 slot

Edit: actually read the OP lol. For Jellyfin I think I’d opt for something a bit more powerful than an SBC.

I am using the official “cloudflared” docker image yeah. Setting up the tunnel was easy but for some reason I’ve had A LOT of trouble getting the DNS and subdomain settings to work consistently.