OK, I'm updating this post. I've built a egg incubator from a junk incubator with a bad temperature controller using a Pi Pico W and Node-Red.
The hardware is A Pi Pico W with a couple of soldered terminal blocks, a DS18X20 temperature probe and a homebrew solid state AC switch made from an AQH3223 solid state switch with a 100 ohm limiting resistor to protect the Pico. I've set it up with PWM at 8 hz and control the duty cycle to control the power to the heater.
The AQH3223 can handle 1.2 amps, so this is good for around 140 watts. The incubator needs 60 watts, so this is fine for low power applications. For higher power I have readily available 10A or higher solid state switches, but the AQH3223 is around a dollar, so it saves lots of money.
Here is the Pico W with soldered terminal blocks for secure connections:
Although there are lots of database plotting programs (like Grafana, etc..) you might like to take a look at the FREE version of Clarify as that integrates quite well with Node-RED.
@zenofmud, @Paul-Reed and myself have been with Clarify on their 30-day free trial for over two years.
I believe that as long as you don't exceed the 30 signals limit, the account remains FREE and active.
Clarify's definition of a signal is a single reading, so you could track up to 30 readings fom your sensors.
Please PM me if you need help in getting up the learning curve to setup Clarify.
You have been amazingly helpful. Other forums are all snark and no help.
Thanks for the offer @dynamicdave . I've been drinking from a firehose learning wise. This is a tool for down the road. Right now my next step is to get Mosquito set up so I don't need to depend on an outside broker and improve my soldering skills.
I'll be getting my first PCB back from China in a week or two having dipped my toe into KiCad. I have a few more controller projects I'll be working on for my mushroom growing and poultry things. I'll let this all soak in a bit.
If you are running Node-RED on a Raspeberry Pi (like a RPi-5B, 4B or 3B) then you can install a local mosquitto broker on it. Here's one link I found on the InterWeb...
I use EasyEDA tools to design my PCBs and JLCpcb to manufacture them (at the moment the total price for manufacturing and delivering 5-off 100mm by 100mm pcbs to my door in the UK is £3.34 inc VAT - unbeliveable, so much fun for such a small outlay).
Ha, ha - no problem.
I took out a free subscription a few months ago to the Oracle Cloud where you can deploy one or more 'virtual machines' (VM). I have three VMs running Node-RED and mosquitto so I have my very own remote MQTT broker (as well as local brokers running on my RPi-4Bs at home).
I have a friend in Boston, USA who uses my remote broker to post the readings from his 'shed', basement (where his boiler is located) and a couple of rooms in his house. Great fun.
I have a number of 'fun things' lined-up for you in the future.
The first one is sending your reports to your mobile phone. Here's an example of the Node-RED flow to send our 'shed' and 'greenhouse' readings to our mobile phones using Telegram. I just tap in 'all' on my phone to activate the feed and 'none' to stop it. Pure magic. Although you'll probably say I'm a bit "sad".
