[zer00eyz]

I like home assistant. There's tons of reasons to use it. You get a lot of good enough moving parts out of the box.

MQTT is something you should set up ASAP. There are plenty of reasons to set it up: ESPresnse is a big one (can't say enough about this offering) AWTRIX is another, even if you aren't going to integrate zigbee.

MQTT becomes a cheap and easy way to add data to, and interact with home assistant. And, any device that communicates over MQTT can be controlled by you (custom code, dead easy) outside HA.

[rekoil]

Oh I do have MQTT setup already, just haven't tried Z2M.