Control addressable LED strips in Home Assistant like a normal light while keeping the LED logic on the ESP.
Home Assistant can control addressable LED strips, but sometimes you want more flexibility than the standard integration provides.
This project uses a simple but powerful idea:
A virtual light entity in Home Assistant controls a physical addressable LED strip running on an ESP device.
This allows the strip to behave like a normal Home Assistant light while keeping the LED logic on the microcontroller.
Advantages:
- Works like a normal light inside Home Assistant
- Custom LED effects can run directly on the ESP
- The ESP keeps full control of the LED strip logic
- Easily extendable with new effects and behaviors
The code so far after flashed it to an ESP via ESP Home Builder in HA:
- New lamp that you can control in HA
- effects will be covered by the ESP
- You will have a dropdown menu for the orientation of the stripe to adjust the wipe on/off effect
- you can choose the number of LED's your physical stripe is capable off -> all effects will adjust to this number
- create your own effects