Thank you for the info! I’m guessing that I could use a mini PC with a zigbee adapter to create my own dashboards or bridge to home assistant, unless zigbee hubs offer similar capabilities

I’m planning on assembling and coding w/e needs coding on microcontrollers, and a mini PC/HA hardware won’t be connected to the cloud. But generally speaking yes: most IoT devices in the US connect to someone else’s computer these daya

Will do. Is it more for security purposes? Reliability?

That’s interesting, I’ll have to read more about mine. I think I purposefully bought the “dumbest” option but will need to experiment with it just like you did

That’s a good point. This can help me with things like adding a DNS server (I’m assuming pi-hole can be run standalone on a mini PC)

Thanks. I thought the already thought out protocols and configurations would make it easier to program the micro controllers to plug in with that rather than building something on my own

My AC is offline, I was thinking I’d just put an infra red LED on a microcontroller in front of it 😅