Although I cannot provide specific examples, NRF24L01 is more of a general purpose chip (it can be used also for wifi and bluetooth) while the LT8900/PL1167 is the native chip implemented by Milight.
Anyway, I have also used PL1167 with ESPMH and did not find significant differences vs. NRF24L01 (also, I think that the respective statement was from like 4 or 5 years ago and meanwhile he improved the code and the gateway performance, like a lot).
In order to keep the hub on the wifi network all the time (I have the NUC running HA and the wifi router on UPS) even if it takes like 3-4 seconds for the NodeMCU to connect back to wifi. Also, sometimes, the power is on and off within a 10 seconds interval until it stabilized, which I think would affect the hub.
Even if you set the ESPMH with MQTT you can still enable UDP gateway in order to be able to use LimitlessLED in HA or the mobile app (probably there is an iOS Milight app although I have tried only for Android; anyway, having HA set, I see no reason to use the mobile app as in HA you can also have better security with https proxying as compared to port forwarding alone to the UDP gateway).
There aren’t too many pros for the LimitlessLED integration: with nearly all HA updates to a newer major version the integration seems to be broken and also UDP makes it a little more buggier compared to MQTT (which is used by ESPMH). Until recently only with LimitlessLED you could do native transitions which I think was the sole advantage, but Chris added transitions to ESPMH directly (until then you would had to do computations in scripts in order to get to the exact timing in order to send MQTT commands).
Although MQTT light integration requires a little more effort as compared to only including IP and light type (for LimitlessLED), there are detailed instructions on how to set it up in the github. Also, Chris also added auto discovery support but I’m using fully manual configs for all MQTT devices, though (not only for lights).
Got it. Will probably just use the NRF I have then.
Ah right, so it’s nothing to do with signal/intereference etc. When I asked the question I’d just come from a Raspberry Pi audio forum and had been reading all about the right power supply meaning everything in regards to jitter etc (lots of them use batteries to power their aux boards and ‘clean’ the supply), wondered if your use case was something similar.
MQTT it is then. Thanks again, really appreciate it!
The external antenna of the board you pointed should improve coverage (it depends on specific factors such as total surface, number of walls, steel reinforcements, etc.; located centrally, mine covers approx. 100 sqm and I didn’t observed additional coverage when using an external antenna with NRF module).
Having also the module I mentioned (or simply adding a capacitor) can improve reliability of the NRF24L01 as there are a lot of cheaper clones sold as genuine products.
Also, additional ESPMHs can be added (you only need state from a single hub to reach HA, the others will only receive commands, otherwise there would be additional MQTT traffic from the other hubs) in order to improve range and reliability.