I thought this would be a easy project as i used Arduino’s before and used the GPIO’s on the rPi, but it appears the Arduino with an built in ESP8266 is more complicated then i thought lol.
I figured the Arduino Mega would best suit my plan as it supports a lot of inputs… I’m configuring wired motion sensors and door sensors througout my house and connecting them all to the Arduino.
I was thinking of either sending a REST command directly to the rPi hosting OpenHAB or publishing it to my MQTT server (whichever is easier).
Has anyone used an Arduino w/ESP8266 together to do this and willing to share some sketches 
The board i’m using is this one from aliexpress:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mega-WiFi-R3-ATmega2560-ESP8266-32Mb-memory-USB-TTL-CH340G-Compatible-for-Arduino-Mega-NodeMCU-WeMos/32801910180.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.keEfuu
Thanks :):)