One of the main factors driving me back to the DK board was the fact that many NCS samples take advantage of the 4 switches + 4 LEDs on the DK board. Even the light_switch sample uses all 4 buttons to trigger different functionality.

The smaller boards don't have room for these switches and LEDs, so you'd have to tweak the program to work around the hardware differences. And that's a big investment if you just wanted to play around with the stock sample code for a few minutes.

A more general critique of the NCS samples is that many of them require a great deal of "polishing" before you can use them in a real project. It would actually be helpful if NCS shipped ready-made overlays that allowed them to run on smaller boards like the MDK and Dongle, in a configuration that's closer to what a shippable product would look like. As it stands, a company that wants to ship a Zigbee bulb or switch has to do a lot of work to convert the samples into something usable.

Maybe this is worth filing some PRs on the sdk-nrf github.

Is there an advantage of using the NRF boards over ESP ones for home automation?

NRF52840 is specified to use 1.5uA when deep sleeping with RTC wake-up, while esp32-c3 is 5uA, which sounds ok, but is not the whole story.

If you try to build something low-power with ESP32 you'll find that it takes a lot of time and energy to go from deep sleep to being able to transmit, while the NRF SDK is designed with that in mind.

The NRF current consumption also includes the built-in voltage regulators -- this works from 1.7v to 5.5v, with a regulated output for peripherals, so all it needs is a battery and some passives.

On the other hand the ESP32 is much more awkward -- it needs 3-3.6v, so you're going to need an external regulator, and a LDO with the required 500mA output current is going to have a significant quiescent current, and even then the voltages are awkward for lithium batteries once you consider the drop-out voltage.

The tl;dr is that it's easy to get multiple years out of a coin cell with an NRF-based sensor, and that's just not happening with any ESP32.

Cheap Chargers are hard wired to deliver up to 2A.

As long as CP2102 can handle it, it's fine, but you can get a 500mA charger.

The non-RISCV ESP's are a very wonky architecture, and while there is lots of ESP code out there, finding stuff that just works is harder than one may think. Meanwhile, pretty much all NRF52840 stuff you will run into just works, and works reliably.

The toolchains and underlying pieces are also basically only supported by EspressIf (yes some work is upstream, but unlike ARM Cortex, you won't find a lot of help from others on Xtensa).

Real debugging of NRF52840 stuff is also easier to do because of this - lots and lots of debug tools work.

You will also get much better documentation out of Nordic.

Now, this is mostly about Xtensa, and almost certainly one of the reasons that they are moving the ESP's toward RISC-V.

I don't have enough experience with the newer RISC-V ones to give you a view there.

I thought the ESP3-S3 with USB integrated serial+soft JTAG adapter would be a big step forward

well turns out the situation with openocd/gdb/flaky USB stack/resetting issues after upload is IMO untenable

if you have a lot of time on your hands, every now and then debugging might work

Some of the newer ESP32 boards do support Zigbee but I don't think they were available yet when I started my project. Might be worth looking into ESP32-C6 now.

As others have mentioned, power consumption is also a consideration. My battery powered devices consume about 25uA and should theoretically last 5+ years on two lithium AAA cells.

"only"

One could buy at least like a dozen ESP32 boards for that price and probably get better support as well.