7th gen i5 NUCs can be found on eBay for under $100 shipped with 16gb of ram and a small m2 drive. They’re not as powerful as a larger SFF chip, but at 15w TDP is pretty hard to beat. I have four of them now. I pick one up every time a find a good deal.
8th gens are still really expensive.
I have three locks and managed to find three newish Kwikset 910 locks for anywhere between $20-40 each. You just have to watch ebay listings and wait for a good deal to pop up.
I honestly just use the frigate web ui as my dashboard. It has everything I need and can be easily accessed from the home assistant app. The only other thing I do is pop up the view on my fully kiosk wall panel when a person is detected for a minute or two. Makes it easy to just glance at who’s at the door without having to fiddle with it.
For that workload, I’d use an ip can and offload the smarts to something like frigate running alongside the rest of my home automation stack. For smaller workloads it’s esp8266/32 all day long. Again, offloading the hard work to my home automation stack rubbing on decent hardware.
I mean this in the nicest way possible, but if this threw you for a loop, you’re in for a world of hurt once you get the software up and running. It’s not rocket science, but learning to administer any Linux server will take a little time. I’m sure it’s not bricked. Consider this an opportunity to learn how to write a new disk image and interact with your new server through the console.