I'm taking the liberty of starting a new thread for Arduino projects, as I couldn't find one dedicated to this, and figure that there may be a few people around here who do this sort of thing. If ...

Don't worry, the coding is simple enough to understand even without prior experience. An Arduino is a much better choice than a Raspberry Pi for tasks that require real-time input and responses.

It's also complemented with a host of online resources that even without the official Projects Book from Arduino, you can start building all sorts of projects.