Two+ years into home automation in pursuit of “aging in place”. I’m having great fun and progress is good, with “OK” W.A.F. It now seems normal to virtually never touch a light switch, control the shades, and have complete insight into health and status of most if not all home systems and appliances. My background is AI & Robotics research at system level, worked on autonomous agents since mid-1980’s; retired.
My systems include over 200 sensor and controller devices, 70 wired and wireless devices using TCP/IP, the rest mostly Zigbee, a few Z-Wave. Two HA (specialized) RPi 4B , with another two almost ready to be hot backups. Many Pi-Zero and M5Atom Lite and other ESP32 devices. I use a multi layered system architecture with a few manufacturer hubs for local control….

Surprises: (1) battery replacement maintenance is mostly infrequent (yay) but a real chore with so many types and little screws to deal with. (2) Lots more network design and management than I expected. (3) If you are privacy conscious like me, you are doing frequent battle with devices and apps that insist on phoning home — sometimes every few seconds. (3) Many devices at all price points do not work reliably or lack functional you need. This is a modification/upgrade treadmill.

Thank you everyone for the worldwide team effort!

Call me David