Opinions needed-Best hardware to control my alternative energy system

[NPMAN]

Hello Everyone!
I would really appreciate people's input. I have had Homeseer since its infancy. I have used X10 and Zwave interfaces. I am finding both of these protocols and equipment far too limiting.

Maybe it would be best to give examples of things I would like to be able to do;
1. Open and close valves in a waste veg oil system. Maybe show temps of my waste oil system on homeseer.
2. When the sun is reaches a certain UV strength, turn on my electric heat.
3. Facial and body recognition to identify single females matching specific parameters. Ha! just kidding. That's a future project!

What road should I go down? Arduino or maybe Rasberry Pi? Use Zwave with Chinese boards that operate in the Zwave frequency?

[S-F]

[mrhappy]

I was reading data about UV index with a Si1145 UV sensor breakout from Adafruit, worked fine except there was virtually no sun at all here last year. I don't know who I was kidding when I installed it. Reading the data on an Arduino was trivial and just transmit it serially to a HS script which in turn updated a HS device.

You could develop stand alone devices to do it (an arduino with a relay on it) or input everything into HS and let HS decide what to do with it, pro's and con's for both really.