Well it's been a while since I spilled my brain on this blog. I will have to admit, some of the time was not spent on research, tinkering, or my idea but that's what happens when you have kids! The summer and fall activities have finally ceased and now it is back to development!
I have just spent the past two days diving deep into the Arduino only to figure out that this may not be the direction I need to go. In my limited experience it just seems the Raspberry Pi is going to accept the inputs, change the needed external devices, and send the results of it's findings on to another PC. So.... tossing the Arduino back in the project box and digging out Pi.
Already found a tutorial on controlling 5050 RGB LED Strip lights so I'll work on that first with a python script and see where that goes. After that, I'll move in to reading RFID tags and finally compiling info via SQL and sharing that data with other machines on the network (LAN not WAN).
Crossing my fingers and diving in!