Noob in early stages of project , looking for pointers

I saw that you were battling with tables. The easy way it to create the table in a normal editor (notepad, vi, ...) and next post it using code tags (the </> button).

Slightly more complex, the below based on Markdown Cheatsheet · adam-p/markdown-here Wiki · GitHub

Arduino Raspberry Pi
Is a dedicated control device generic compute
Can be very small relatively large
Low power higher power draw
Directly control solid state relay may need interface
inbuilt comms limited excellent comms