Pancho wrote:
My preference would be a simple cheap low voltage switch like sonoff
(with tasmota) driver, powered off 24v ac (actually slightly higher) or
usb if available. But only if it is documented and simple.

The Sonoff is an ESP8266 wifi microcontroller, which is exactly what I'd
want for this task. Running Tasmota, it does one job and does it
acceptably. Once you have Tasmota on there, and the relevant config string
for your particular device pasted into its web page, that's it. You can
control everything from the webpage, or it provides an API (MQTT) you can
then control from something fancier.

You can instead use a Pi, but it doesn't come configured out of the box and
there's a million ways you could set it up. It also doesn't come in a
convenient physical package, and if it goes wrong (for example loses
networking) you have to plug a screen in or pull the SD card and boot it on
another Pi.

What I have is Tasmota on the endpoint (the wifi mains plug) and Home
Assistant (hass.io) on a Pi on my desk, chatting with MQTT. All the
complicated stuff runs on the Pi, and if it breaks I can easily get at it to
fix it.

So if it were me I'd bite the bullet and get the USB cable for the Sonoff.
You have a hardware solution that does what you want, you just need to
reprogram it with the right firmware.

Theo