which platform for a home automation project?

Hello everyone,

This is my first post to this forum, I'm a beginner in this thing that you are doing here and need some help.

I'm architect by profession, I've discovered Arduino during the Covid lock down and successfully built my first project: A car parking sensor with hum., temp. battery meter thanks to this blog YT channel. During the epidemic I also set up a raspberry pi NAS and completed a crash course in Python. The progress was slow but the "Aha!" moments were rewarding enough to keep me going.

Currently I'm in early planning phase of a home automation project. Below you can find the description of my project and some questions/dilemmas at the end that I would appreciate if you can answer or provide me with your advice. Here are my project specs:

Devices:
- a motorized sliding garage door;
- a motorized sliding shutter with adjustable louvers;
- two local heat recovery ventilators (HRV) placed in the living room and bedroom and one extraction vent in the bathroom;
- weather monitor (outside temp., hum. and pressure), two indoor air quality monitors for HRVs (temp., hum., pressure, CO2 and VOC sensors) one hum sensor for bathroom extraction vent and illumination sensor for brise-solei.

Operation:
1 - I would like to control all devices manually (buttons on devices themselves or integrated with house electrical switch boxes) and remotely via phone or computer (also outside my home wi-fi network).
2 - Beside my manual or remote control, the shutter, the HRVs and the bathroom vent will have an automated mode of operating responding to the sensor data.
3 - I would like to monitor the sensor data with on my phone and computer (dashboards) and store the environmental data (preferably on my computer or local cloud than an outside cloud like Arduino IOT cloud).
4 - Because of my beginner skill level and time constrains I'm thinking about dividing the project into two phases: In the first phase I build the devices and control them manually only. In the second phase I install the sensor modules, set up the monitoring, set up remote control and upgrade the system in such a way that devices respond to conditionals based on sensor data.

What is somewhat unclear to me and my question to the forum is, how to implement this? Or more precisely, which cybernetic scheme should I follow (I'm sorry for the selection of words, I'm not an electronics engineer) in terms of centralized/decentralized distribution of sensors from the view point of devices:

Option A:  each device has its own pack of sensors wired to its micro controller (I would like to avoid this if possible because of point 4 above but prepared to do it this way if you recommend it), or
Option B:  the micro controller of each device is just a switch (On/Off) and regulates the the movement of devices (fan sped for HRV, position for shutter and garage door and louver angle for shutter) and have all the sensors wired to a separate micro controller. I'm thinking about positioning this micro controller and the living room sensors in the same box on the ceiling on the ground floor and wire the sensors in the bathroom and bedroom (both in the 1st floor) to this same box (the house is currently under construction so it is not a problem how to physically achieve this). In such a way I could collect the sensor data of all rooms with one micro controller that would communicate with the micro controllers of the various devices via Bluetooth or wi-fi). Question: Could the distance of the sensors in the 1st floor from the micro controller (max 4 meter wire length) influence the sensor readings?

Option B would be easier for me to do due to point 4 above: I could build the devices and control them manually firs and then upgrade them with automation later. I also think that in the case of HRVs it is better that the sensors are on a certain distance from the intake fans so that the fresh air doesnt distort the inside air quality readings. What do you think? Should the sensor be part of devices themselves or be part of an independent sensor hub?

My next question is: can I build this project just with micro controllers or do I need a raspberry pi also? Im asking this because my learning curve is more steep with arduinos than raspberry pi. After my initial research I thought I need a raspberry pi if I want my devices to respond not only to sensor data but also to time (time of day or season) which is needed for the shutter for example (I want the shutter to be retracted in winter time to maximize sun intake and closed in summer time.). Ive tried to publish the data from a CO2 sensor that I wired to a raspberry pi 4B to a grafana web dashboard but I struggled just to run the program in terminal, had issues with installing MicroPython and could not accomplish installing Grafana, Mosquito and node Red to publish the sensor data to a grafana web dashboard.

After discovering platforms like Arduino IOT cloud, Anvil or what this guy does, I found out raspberry pi is not necessarily needed for my project. Most recently Ive discovered the OpenHAB, which runs on a raspberry pi but has a graphical user interface where you build your control and monitorning sistem.

My final questions is aimed at which programming language to choose and off course also affects the selection of micro controller and platform:
- Option I: just C++. I use Arduino micro controllers and Arduino IOT cloud platform. I like the simplicity but It is too cloudy (cant store the sensor data locally) and the free plan allows only two things.
- Option II: just python. I use Seeduino Xiao or ESP32 and Anvil platform. Would need to learn some Python which is not a problem. Has a free plan which I assume allows for more devices than Arduino IOT cloud.
- Option III: Follow this guys experiments. C++ or Python and I assume HTML for the website? I think it would be too trick for me to build a website with switches, dashboards and data logs from scratch.
- C++ and arduinos and OpenHAB that runs on a raspberry pi: If I understand correctly I could use OpenHAB to remote control and automate my devices based on my input, time restraints and sensor data. The relations would not be programmed on the level of micro controllers but prescribed in OpenHAB graphical user interface, yes? Also am I right to assume that OpenHAB already has all the protocols installed so I don't need to mess with Mosquito, Node-RED and such in terminal?

This is it. I hope you guys were able to understand what is unclear to me and will be able to provide me some guidance.

Thank you and have a nice day,

Rastisan