Hello @mfalkvidd , very appreciative of your help and assistance. Very happy to have found this forum and your website.
Lots of good information here. I'll dig into the links to get more familiar with my initial setup and testing.
Regarding sensors...I've purchased some Tart sensors and Grove sensors. I'm still trying to work out what sensors I should use. For now we are only using environmental type sensors (water in the boat to indicate pump not working...battery charging, temperature). But from what I've been reading about IOT I'm very interested in growing my devices to go beyond reporting and being able to 'Do' things when instructed. I'm looking forward to lots of fun on this project!
When you mention a serial gateway, does this include a Tart Sensor Gateway or a z-wave add on board to help me 'Talk' to my sensors? I'm not married to any one type of sensor yet. We bought a few tart sensors because they small, wireless, run of a button battery for more than a year (supposedly). But the plethora of z-wave have more than just sensors but home control devices as well. Seems developing my first solution on z-wave using a RaZberry Hat/addon would be a good way to begin my project and allow me to grow. But I'm still very new to the whole IOT ecosystem so perhaps others can give me advice on what they would use instead to monitor environmental conditions and be able to grow into doing more.
My basic requirements for environmental monitors are limiting but essential for my use case:
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Wireless
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Not overly expensive (this is subjective I know)
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Battery operated for at least a year (button battery ideally).
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Easy to install and attach to a Pi Gateway
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Pi Gateway can collect sensor data from more than one sensor.
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Ideally I want to run as few applications as possible on my Raspberry Pi so minimal install with minimal applications (preferably no databases or webpages on my Pi). I'm looking to have my Pi receive the various environmental monitoring data and push it to my home server through a VPN connection. Since I'm not at the boathouse 24x7 being able to ensure that my Raspberry Pi doesn't become corrupted if the power gets yanked is what I'm aiming for. I'll be looking to use perhaps a Read Only O/S on my Pi so I won't be collecting data on my Pi Gateway.
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If openhab is the best way to go...I'm hoping to have openhab on my home server receiving this information from my Pi Gateway(s). I'm researching now on how to serve up a dashboard for openhab and perhaps use an Android app to display data from my openhab server.
Not sure if this is too much to ask or not but I''ll dig into the links you provided to find the answers I need.
Thanks again for any help you can provide or pointers you can give to where I can find the information I need.