Q: How difficult: Arduino from scratch w/ smart home integration?

[CMetaphor]

So just a quick -ish Q:
I've got an idea for something I'd like in my home, but no product exists that matches what I want. So, I'm considering making it myself (eventually).

I think an Ardunio is the way to go, but have zero experience with it.

The Q part: how difficult would it be to make such a project with an Ardunio, some sort of box and mounting, a motor or two, positional sensors (or motors with feedback / stepper motors?) and, most importantly *Smart home/ Alexa Integration*?

I did plenty of programming some... owch... 22ish years ago? Was quite decent at it, just my career rarely ever followed a programming path (save some Adovr PDF programming, akin to Java, I think? But that was also about 10ish years ago).

What do you guys think / suggest?

 

[Izerous]

One pain point with their home automation is they basically expect everything to fit into their IoT templates to a certain extent. if you try to release it to the public it can be a huge nightmare. But to stay in private beta is quite loosy goosy.

Otherwise hardware wise ardunio (or similar) with network access, a couple drivers, a couple motors and you have most of your hardware. Software will take some time to get what you want done depending on the complexity.

 

[lowfat]

Are you sure ESPHome can't do what you want? But without Home Assistant or similar, nothing will integrate w/ Alexa.

 

[CMetaphor]

Don't know what ESPHome is, but it'll look it up.