Custom light entity/attributes/card

Hi,

I have an LED strip with individually addressable LEDs. I have written lots of custom light effects for the led strip, which I can control via MQTT. I want to be able to see the state and control the LED strip in Home Assistant via MQTT. So far, I’ve integrated the LED strip as light entity via the MQTT integration and I’m using the default light card on a dashboard, as well as the custom light entity card by ljmerza (Light Entity Card). Both cards have some nice features, but both fall short to satisfy my needs.

The default light card hido you think I’d get better answers fromdes all the effect and color features behind the small three dot menu and lacks speed control. The custom card shows the color swatch and effects dropdown by default, but it seems like the speed parameter is no longer functional.

Let’s say I wanted to create a custom card, which supports any number of custom attributes, like speed, a second color attribute, etc. I want the new attributes to be stored in the entity state and get transmitted via MQTT. How would I go about doing that? Can I use the existing light entity and somehow add new custom attributes, or do I need to create a new entity? How would I go about creating a new entity and can I inherit from light? Can I make these customizations in a card/config or do I need to go deeper into the frontend/core code of Home Assistant?

Is this forum the right place to ask these questions or is there some other place where devs hang out (Discord), who might have better insights into this topic?

Feedback is much appreciated.
Thanks!