Flickering like this usually occurs when the controller and lights are not using the same ground.

It’s possible these don’t enter boot mode by default. Try grounding gpio pin 0.

Just to add clarification for everyone, the chip you get off of Amazon will be the same quality as alliexpress, it will just arrive faster. Also don’t sweat it, it still works so I’m sure you’ll get it figured out.

My first thought would be an air quality sensor but I’m not sure how sensitive they would be to food smells. I’ve never used one but there are plenty of examples online.

A fallback would be a timer, if you know when your neighbor usually cooks, you could turn your fan on during those times with some buffer.

I have all the TV inputs automated via voice commands. Eg. If you say “let’s watch plex”, tv turns on if off, input switches, HDMI switch changes, and Plex launches on the shield.

I’ve had no issues with zooz products, if I had to guess I’d say they are trying to cover themselves from an automation starting a fire. Those two outdoor plugs are also not rated for below freezing, so the Enbrighten seems like a better fit.

I can’t speak to the Feit brand so you’ll have to look how to control those, so the home assistant forums are your best bet for integrating those. Wemo brand does have an integration, so it should not be too hard to use those. As far as presence detection, these athom sensors have worked well for me, however I have not used them in bedroom where people are in bed sleeping.

Yes home assistant allows you to take actions based on the state of other smart devices. For example, when I turn on my foyer light, that also trigger my hallway lights to turn on.

I’ve used anthom presence detector and it worked well. They sell an esphome bulb. You can always mess around with an esphome using a dupont wire with some copper tape to connect it to the base to trigger the light just through Home Assistant. That way you can decide if you want to open it and integrate it later.

I would caution going too far down the custom rabbit hole for something like a light bulb, just because you will eventually have to replace it. At that point I would look at a zigbee/zwave lightbulb with a esp32 in the base powered by a AC to DC converter to control the bulb. You would need a stick to control it but the trade off is a much easier replacement later on.

I missed the part about switching to RGB LED, but I’m not sure if any products are bright enough to be useful. You are right that if you powered the Shelly with ac, it outputs ac, which goes against your Edison bulb replacement idea. If you can find something that runs on 12v (like a light strip), that case no relay would be needed. You could replace the AC cord with a 12v DC adapter to power the lights and use a cheap 5-30v to 5v buck converter to power the esp32.

Do you care about dimming or running an extra cord into the lamp? Someone has done something similar here with just an esp32 and smart switch. If you want just a single cord, you’ll need esp32, AC to DC 5v board, and some dry contact ac relay module. The code would be similar but the esp32 would directly control the relay instead of using a switch.

Edit: thinking about it more, you may also just be able to use a shelly 1 relay flashed with esphome has gpio pins and can run off ac power but it uses an esp8266 so not sure how that would work with capacitive touch.

It might be a good idea for a post. I run HA in docker and haven’t dug into the documentation yet.

I’ve used this remote and it works well but it is zwave. In general, you want battery powered devices to be either zwave or zigbee since they use less power. If you want to connect the smart plugs to an existing switch you can use a Shelly relay or a smart switch

My go-to for anything sensor related is esphome. Maybe a resistance sensor could work for you. https://esphome.io/components/sensor/resistance.html

Try setting up the . I’ve used this in the past to get Google home speaker groups to work across vlans.

What router OS are you using?

About 30 pins could be used for various inputs depending on the board. Here is a good reference. https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-pinout-reference-gpios/

Someone wrote a pretty good guide to get it installed on a raspberry pi. https://community.home-assistant.io/t/install-and-setup-zwave-js-ui-with-snap-on-a-raspberry-pi/486484