I'm surprised to see the Pi in there; I would naively expect a microcontroller (my first thought today would be https://www.espressif.com/en/products/socs/esp32-c6 but there are options). Is this arrangement a matter of how easy it is to implement, age of the project (predating good MC options), or a harder technical/practical blocker?
We actually thought about a pure microcontroller solution, but stuffing a zigbee coordinator, a mqtt parser and a lorawan stack into an uC seemed a bit overwhelming. It is technically possible with beefier SoCs, but as most ingredients we needed were well available for a PI, we went this route while building the first prototype.
