Raspberry Pi is really good at all the things you'd use a mac mini/old beige box gathering dusting in your closet for at $30 and small enough to fit in a project box. It's not very good at embedded systems, but it's not really meant for embedded systems. My standing desk is controlled by an Arduino, because after a couple of months of sending bug reports to the manufacturer I learned they didn't have any actual engineers on staff, just some dude with a degree in industrial design, and it would be much less trouble for me to DIY than to try to funnel electronics 101 to the dude with an industrial design degree via the customer support people who act insulted when I notice half the bugs I'm reporting are caused by them confusing pin 4 and pin 17.