> Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address.
I think this might be the case. Get a USB zigbee dongle and spend ~1 hour setting up Home Assistant and you're more or less done. Adding a new device consists of clicking a button in HA to enable permission for devices to join and then powering on the device. It will discover the network and report the features it exposes.
You can control devices via HA over wifi. Plus HA gives you an API that you don't have to maintain and update as you add new classes of devices to the network.
You'll spend far more time repeatedly replacing batteries with wifi devices than you will with configuring HA once.
Edited to add: one nice thing I forgot to mention is that using HA for your own homebrew devices lets you keep a single consistent API for those and commercial devices. You can build a little ESP32 device with custom sensors, displays, etc. and control those exactly as you would with off-the-shelf products.
I really need to figure out how deep I want to go -- HomeAssistant is clearly the best off the shelf option. Maybe I'll set up HA first and then see if it really is worth trying to build something better.
I think this might be the case. Get a USB zigbee dongle and spend ~1 hour setting up Home Assistant and you're more or less done. Adding a new device consists of clicking a button in HA to enable permission for devices to join and then powering on the device. It will discover the network and report the features it exposes.
You can control devices via HA over wifi. Plus HA gives you an API that you don't have to maintain and update as you add new classes of devices to the network.
You'll spend far more time repeatedly replacing batteries with wifi devices than you will with configuring HA once.
Edited to add: one nice thing I forgot to mention is that using HA for your own homebrew devices lets you keep a single consistent API for those and commercial devices. You can build a little ESP32 device with custom sensors, displays, etc. and control those exactly as you would with off-the-shelf products.