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@Sarahw @zimpenfish The Raspberry Pi in the greenhouse with a bunch of sensors uploading to to the web server with some graphing front end software was a lockdown project. The web server and database were there anyway, I just added more code.

Home Assistant arrived because we had a solar PV system put in, and the universal recommendation as to how to get it to do what I wanted was to use HA.

Then seeing as I had HA running I thought I might as well get it to do other things, such as control the central heating, as it was far too clever to be allowed to get away with doing nothing but reconfiguring an inverter twice a day. And to understand the performance of the central heating it's interesting to know the outdoor temperature without having to switch screens or apps, so I hooked the two systems together. So the temperature reading gets from the garden into the house via a server in, I believe, Manchester.

The remote access, involving certificate, dynamic DNS, port forwarding, and getting Giffgaff to remove a block was an entire separate months-long (part time) project.