For the Aoostar I got the 19V version of “UPS Battery Backup, 24000 mAh Intelligent Compact UPS with High Security for Modem (19V)” from Amazon,

and got the exact same in 12V for my router/modem

I’ve been running my Aoostar R1 for over a year now, no issue at all. ~14W at idle with the 2HDD in standby. 32G RAM, a low power SK hynix Gold P31 1TB NVME. I’ve re-used the pair of 14TB HDDs from my WD NAS and recently got a pair of 12TB refurbished HDD for ca 240€ to use the old WD NAS as a backup. I run Proxmox with a bunch of LXC containers (12 mostly) of which a pair of pi-hole, pair of VPN/hardened SSH, fileserver, home automation, Logitech media server, Jellyfin etc etc etc The R1 is not that noisy, never crashed once, does not heat up and is powered through a 88.8Wh mini UPS.

My WH1080 weather station has a USB-A connector on the device side, I assume for the convenience of the slimmer profile.

That’s the only natural occurrence of that cable I’ve ever seen.

The other one was a custom board printed in 2001 at the electronics class, where I was some kind of precursor by powering it with a USB cable rather than a bulky lab power supply. As I did salvage the connector it was a A-A abomination but they had that cable at the supermarket for some reason ¯_(ツ)_/¯

If you already own a domain name, you could use Cloudflare tunnels using cloudflared (it’s free).

Proxmox with Debian LXC containers. The most natural transition from Raspberry Pi OS which is a Debian flavor

Un-smarting our home is indeed my current concern if I would pass suddenly. It’s mostly usable manually but most switches would continually try to connect to WiFi and mqtt. I rather hope have my teenager son be able to take over if need be. My passwords could be accessed by my wife anytime but I’m not sure she realises it, it would be to be documented.