It is hardware and it is sort of OEM related. I have been looking at ESPHome and realised it has native support for the temperature sensors I have. The BLE data via the RaspberryPi is a bit erratic and the Pi locks up when one of the BLE calls is made (obviously a blocking call in the NodeJS library).
So I thought I’d send for an ESP32 board from China - no hurry!
I know to watch out for the WEMOS D1 and make sure you get a genuine one. I wonder if it is the same for the ESP32 boards and if so any recommendations?
I now only buy from their shop having had a number of so called Wemos boards that are clearly copies. Look under a magnifying glass and you can see the difference in quality.
I have never had a problem with a genuine board. Cannot say the same about the others.
For other voltages I use adjustable power supplies from chinese suppliers on ebay. Had a few duff ones but they usually fail immediately and at the price I can live with that. I used to use power supplies from https://www.dimensionengineering.com. Rock solid but expensive. All my network hardware is powered from this 24V as are my emoncms and nodered servers. It is effectively a home built UPS. We do get occasional power cuts and its nice to carry on working when the grid goes down. The only issue I have had was when I also powered outside LED lighting from the 24V. I had network issues and I finally tracked them down to very short sharp voltage drops as the LEDs came on. I fitted an old mains DC power supply to the lights so I didn’t have to rewire them. Using a Sonoff plug with tasmota modifying the Nodered controls was trivial.