Petera:
That is awesome. I would totally be wiling to jump into the RPi box, but I feel like wring a usb thermometer to GPIO pins is way above my head.
Even for a phone guy.
:-(
Not at all. In fact it's exactly what a "phone guy" could be doing. There's so much info out there to get you started. You'll start to see the real strength in HG with a project like that. I'm running a few serial port projects through HG at the moment.
I parked up HG a while back in favour of Home Assistant which has a huge community input. It's Python based and has so many interfaces available to it it's mind blowing. All the hard work has been done. I decided to revisit HG and enjoying the challenge.
I recommend trying out the thermometer project via the GPIO or the Sense Hat. The Arduino route is even a more interesting challenge and one you could tackle at a later stage.