@peetje and/or @70mmy I’d suggest you set up an esp with uart debug and see if you can find uart messages on one of the wires.
Then check if the messages match the known protocol.
I can provide some pointers on that if required.
If it’s just that the whole thing is on 3v rather than 5v but it uses the same protocol then that should be pretty easy to adjust to accommodate. It’s preferable actually.