[Crosseye_Jack]

Dunno what the performance of the Pi Zero 2 is compared to the Pi3 (iirc they have the same number of cores, but the Pi Zero 2 has less ram), but I happily run Home Assistant on a Pi3 even with a couple of DOODS detectors running on it processing camera feeds (however it takes about 500ms to process them iirc - its been a while since I set them up and I actually store the recordings of those cameras off the Pi).

Have fun, its a rabbit hole, but a fun one :-)

EDIT: Also if you are in the UK. Poundland have some Tuya/SmartLife compatable Wifi sockets for £5 a piece - https://www.poundland.co.uk/446890-ultrabrite-wifi-controlle... You can open them and reflash then with Tasmota but they are a pain to open.

The EASY option is to stick with using Tuya/Smartlife and add Tuya/Smartlife to HA, just remember to remove the Smartlife skill from Alexa otherwise you can end up with dupicates and Alexa getting confused when you want to turn things on/off.

ATM (imo) the "tuya old" intergration is better than the current offical tuya version (They changed things when updating it, which removed some compatibility but they said they would re add it at a later date, but duno if Tuya actually got round to it yet).

Also if you do use Home Assisant, get into the habbit of reading the patch notes before updating, quiet often there will be breaking changes which mess up with your set up.

[iicc]

>You can open them and reflash then with Tasmota but they are a pain to open.

Not sure if you tried it, but depending on the age of the stock or the tardiness of the OEM in applying security patches, it may be possible to flash them without opening them first.

https://github.com/ct-Open-Source/tuya-convert#procedure

[BenjiWiebe]

Some Tuya/SmartLife sockets can't be flashed with tasmota. I've got 2 that don't use Espressif SoC's.

[Crosseye_Jack]

Yeah I have one RGB light that uses a ThingsTurn module (which iirc is based on a w600) and I couldn't be arsed to swap out the module for a ESP.

But I have 10 (8 in use, two on hand incase I ever want another lamp/secuirty light around the home, well atm the spares are in use for the christmas lights, but will go back into standby status after the lights come down.) of these ultrabight poundland sockets and all of them are ESP based. (though the ones I've recently added to my collection couldn't be flashed with tuyaconvert and needed some surgery, the last 2 in my collection I couldn't be arsed and just left them with the Tuya firmware and use the tuya API to control them, but thats my own lazyness not that they cna't be done.)

For ceiling lights I use shellys so I could retain the use of the wall switch to control them.