Somehow I'd heard of ESPHome over the years but never really looked into what it was.

I was thinking of an idea for something, and remembered I had an unopened Sparkfun ESP32 Thing and had a play - holy crap, this makes making little automation gadgets for #homeassistant so easy!

Also - amazing that for ~AU$25 you can get a little device with WiFi/Bluetooth and an LCD display from AliExpress. So now waiting for that to actually build the thing I want to build.