Planning smart home project

I'm finally getting around to IoT. I've been excited about it way before the Internet of Things was a term.
After playing around with Arduino projects for a few years, I figured it's time to move on to custom projects.

My main concerns are:

• Low power devices
• Wireless
• Encryption
• Message signing

My two power players are going to be the ESP8266 for Wifi and the NRF24L01 for RF.
In my opion, the power depand for the ESP8266 are too demanding for long term battery use. Becaus of this, I plan on using the ESP8266 as a bridge for NRF24L01 nodes.

I stumbled onto a forum post for message signing specifically for the NRF24L01 by MySensors.org. I am stunned at how detailed the documentation is. Because of this, I plan on looking into using MySensors as the main chunk of what I thought I would have to write myself. I wish they included some kind of encryption layer but I can't ask for everything to already be done for me :)

Below are my initial project ideas as well as articles/videos on topics I've been researching.

Project Ideas

• Dish washer clean/dirty state.
  (Not just a wash cycle completion indicator) I need to know when if the dishes were ever removed after the clean cycle.
• Lower power Interior door gyro sensors
• Lower power Exterior door latch sensors. Fast response from sleep mode
• Lower power window sensor. Fast response from sleep mode

Things to learn