I quite like the IKEA bulbs and buttons, but not their base station, I just use a standard zigbee one.

However, I don’t want matter, I just want zigbee. Its well behaved, a known quantity and they’re light bulbs. Giving them an IP stack is just increasing the attack target footprint. I do not understand the benefits or appeal of it.

a good learning example would be recreating his designs yourself in CAD and writing your own firmware, or rolling your own version of QMK or whatever its running

RP2040 is another jellybean part, much of a muchness. I’ve got both on devboards in my parts box.

They’re mostly using off the shelf chinese esp modules. They look like very polished hobby projects.

I’m a little envious of someone making what they want and selling it to people who want to buy it.