Use Addressable LED Strips in Home Assistant Without the Usual Limitations

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a small ESPHome project I built while experimenting with addressable LED strips in Home Assistant.

The core idea is simple:

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 actual LED logic on the ESP.

The current example implements a simple wipe on/off effect, but the real purpose of the project is the architecture behind it:

Home Assistant handles the control layer, while the ESP handles the LED execution layer.

That means the concept could later be extended with things like:

  • custom effects
  • segment logic
  • per-LED behavior
  • signal-driven LED control

Originally I also wanted to support configurable LED count and strip orientation from Home Assistant, but I could not get that part working cleanly with ESPHome.

So I’m publishing this as a community project in the hope that others might improve or extend it.

GitHub repository: GitHub - LKSkywalker85/ha-addressable-led-controller: Control addressable LED strips in Home Assistant like a normal light while keeping the LED logic on the ESP. · GitHub

I’d especially appreciate feedback from people with experience in ESPHome, addressable LEDs, or virtual entity architectures in Home Assistant.