Truth be told, while I had known about ESPHome while working on this project, for some reason, I just felt the urge to hack together my own firmware.
It might've been because my early testing was done via an old Arduino Uno board, and I must've figured that I might as well port the sketch over to the ESP32 once I had it working.
(I'm general though, I will say that LLMs can totally write bespoke one-off firmwares like this, and I don't feel too bad about it, given that it's running entirely within my LAN, and will never actually get "productized")
It might've been because my early testing was done via an old Arduino Uno board, and I must've figured that I might as well port the sketch over to the ESP32 once I had it working.
(I'm general though, I will say that LLMs can totally write bespoke one-off firmwares like this, and I don't feel too bad about it, given that it's running entirely within my LAN, and will never actually get "productized")