I’ve spent some time learning MQTT and have a few Sonoffs with Tasmota working.
The plan now is to monitor 4 doors and 3 motion detectors from my alarm system. Was going to use a NodeMCU (ESP8266). Testing, I have it working for 1 input, but I’m thinking it’s a bit inefficient and cumbersome to write a sketch that runs a loop reading 7 digital inputs, and publishing an MQTT topic when the state changes. Seems it might be simpler just to flash the NodeMCU with Tasmota.
Thoughts?
I’d suggest esphome.
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Thanks. I had briefly looked at that, but dismissed it as I’m running Hass.io in a Hyper-V VM so no USB access.
Then I read the fine FAQ and discovered you can compile/download/flash outside of HA, so I’ll give it a try. Looks really quite good.
Yes, you can compile your setup inside of ESPHome, then download the binary and flash your device. ESPHome made it super easy to get this stuff setup.
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Holy crap is that slick! I’m really impressed.
Got it all configured, and I’m not even home. RDP to my laptop which still had the nodeMCU plugged in to USB.
The only thing I can’t test remotely is pulling the GPIO pins to ground 
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Well, technically, you could glue legos to stepper motors to make a primitive robot arm, then control that arm remotely using a small camera for vision and an old Atari 2600 joystick for precision…or something…then go ham on all of your pins.