I had a Pimironi Plasma Stick 2040 W with 5m of WS2812/Neopixel-compatible addressable LEDS (50) and wanted to see if I could transfer the strip to an esp32 board running ESPHome to gain some control/interaction of the lights through Home Assistant. As I dug into the details (and to my delight) I discovered that ESPHome could be installed directly on the device (which uses a Raspberry Pi Pico W). After that, with all the support material provided on ESPHome it was a doddle and It is now seamlessly integrated with Home Assistant. The UI is elegant and very functional allowing me to select colour, and brightness of the overall strip and even select various provided effects controlling individual leds.
I just wanted to shout out a thank you to everyone involved in making this such an accessible project with such an elegant and powerful solution but also to encourage any newbies out there with the same board sitting around to go for it - if I can do you can too!
Aside from the default settings provided during set up this is the relevant part part of the boards yaml file for the led set up
light:
- platform: rp2040_pio_led_strip
name: your_preferred_name
id: led_strip
pin: GPIO15
num_leds: 50
pio: 0
rgb_order: RGB
chipset: WS2812