It's obviously way too late now but esphome is a very nice easy mode solution for the whole remote upload/logging/server/mqtt/iot widget thing if you don't want to drag in esp-idf. First time bootstrap is via serial/webusb and then it's all OTA.<p>You can write custom c++ modules for bits they don't have already, although that's pretty rare. Often used with HA but it works fine standalone with MQTT too, and deployment doesn't have to be from a server.<p><a href="https://esphome.io/" rel="nofollow">https://esphome.io/</a>