I hope the new year finds everyone well.

I'm looking for strategy rather than programming help and I hope experience or a clever approach can simplify what has turned into an arduous task. I am building a controller for my aquarium; the first was successful, but new skills motivate me to improve and, well... new features mean complexity.

In a nutshell, I'm looking for an efficient menu system - a way to set ON and OFF times of lighting, set days of the week that dosing pumps dose, adjust temperature... such as that. On my previous attempt I used 2 methods: a 3 button matrix and a serial connection. The 3 buttons where quick - emergency or simple settings. The serial connection allowed for command line entry and entering multiple parameters when required. Both systems had their drawbacks - the buttons required shuffling through sub-menu after sub-menu; the serial required that I retrieve my laptop...

I have begun a compromise using an old SONY remote; it works, but I'm not satisfied - buttons are not correctly labeled and shuffling values, strings, DATA and READ statements is tedious beyond endurance. I need to control about a half dozen devices and likely have 3 or 5 mixed WORD and BYTE values to manipulate per device [I.E. an RTC - 6 registers of time, alarms, day and date; 3 12V dosing pumps BYTE days of operation WORD start time WORD duration; 8 plug relay board...]

I'd ask the group - do you know or have you used something better/ easier/ you'd recommend to a beginner? Perhaps I'm simply approaching this wrong and there are ways (using extended EEPROM, an encoder, or some other "trick or tool" to make this simpler) to minimize or organize my efforts? Maybe the ideal way is Wi-Fi or an Android module and my phone? I'm just finding my PicBasic legs and don't really want to start off in some unsupported direction based on a sales pitch.

Any advice?