That kind of ketchup is unacceptable anyway. I mean what would you use it for? It just tastes of sweetened, cooked tomatos. Just buy curry ketchup. And put mayo on the fries. Or Joopie sauce.

HA isn’t the only option. I think there’s two other open source smarthome solutions out there(?) And you could probably do with just an MQTT broker and a Python script, or something like that…

But HA isn’t a bad choice. They’re doing a phenomenal job. And related projects like ESPHome make it really easy to integrate microcontrollers. And if you want to do more smarthome stuff, it has a plethora of features, integrations, an app…

Extra hardware isn’t absolutely necessary. I have one server at home which does NAS, and I use 4GB of it’s RAM to run a virtual machine with Home Assistant. That’s enough for it, including a bunch of Addons.