Let’s say you have 2 scripts that do some stuff:

• script A: turns a light pink for 20 seconds and then through a smart speaker you can hear 30 seconds of La Macarena.
• script B: send 25 notifications to your phone, spaced by 30 seconds, in which each notification is a different letter of an encrypted message.

If you want those things to happen independently you must parallelize them.

So think about an automation that at a certain point you want to launch multiple scripts. I’d always parallelize, even if initially these scripts were “instantaneous”, because you might change these and add more complexities in the future.

Parallel stuff is also used for… Well, some sequences you want to run in parallel.

Also, test your automations! Specially those critical. It’s very essy, you can virtually trigger them.

I use ZHA. As I have a Pi, I prefer the less addons the better, and there are ZHA devices for everything. It simply narrows down the spectrum, but overtime it’s coming closer and closer to Z2M in terms of device support and features… So…

There is also Matter and Thread on the horizon, so I wouldn’t bother complicating things further.

Also bought an ESP and some components but haven’t yet done anything.

Just make sure you have a prototyping board.

I hate soldering, so I will only cross that road once I have a very solid project and idea.

Are those shortcut buttons? How?m

I get scared about Rust when reading about these things and I understand nothing.

Hopefully you don’t need this knowledge to build something useful 😅

https://zigbee.blakadder.com/

I was surprised by this, but if you care about the environment and need some coin cell sensors (or simply already have them) there actually exist rechargable coin batteries.

Did you check the ZHA compatibility list? Find it, and stick to it.

I suggest limiting yourself to ZHA, which is natively supported by Home Assistant, specially in these early stages.

I am doing that, and essentially waiting until Matter becomes the bigger protocol.

I guess you are asking this question because you want it to be a Zigbee router (or whatever it’s called).