Athom
Athom WLED WS2812B LED strip controller (pre-flashed)
- Wi-Fi
Verified September 2026
The tinkerer's route to addressable LED strips: an ESP8266/ESP32 controller pre-flashed with WLED, which Home Assistant auto-discovers via its native, fully local wled integration — effects, segments, presets and all. The board's 3A output caps direct-driven WS2812B runs at roughly 50 pixels before you need to inject 5V power separately every metre or so of dense strip, so budget a beefier PSU and screw-terminal wiring skills for a full room. Against a retail RGBIC strip like Govee's, you trade app polish and plug-and-play connectors for unlimited local effects, zero cloud lag, and change from a tenner instead of forty quid.
In Home Assistant
| Control | Type | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Segment light | Light (per segment) | One light entity per configured WLED segment when 2+ segments exist — independent on/off, colour, brightness, effect and palette per section of the strip. |
| Master light | Light | Created alongside segment lights; controls overall strip power and brightness across all segments simultaneously, but not colour or effect. |
| Preset / playlist | Select | Activates a saved WLED preset or playlist stored on the device — the way to apply a coordinated multi-segment look in one action. |
| Segment intensity / speed | Number | Per-segment controls for the active effect's intensity and speed, adjustable independently of the effect selection itself. |
| Sync receive/send | Switch | Toggles WLED's native UDP broadcast sync for keeping multiple WLED devices' effects in lockstep. |
With two or more WLED segments defined, HA's wled integration doesn't just expose effect/preset selection on one entity — it creates a genuinely separate light entity per segment, each independently controllable for on/off, colour, brightness, effect and palette, plus one master light entity that toggles power and brightness across the whole strip. Setup is push-based over WebSocket when available, falling back to periodic polling if not, and per-segment number entities expose live effect speed and intensity rather than baking them into presets. One real limitation: HA has no single control to push a colour or effect change to all segments at once — you either drive each segment entity separately or fall back to a WLED preset that already encodes the multi-segment state.
Specs
- gpio
- ESP8285H16: button GPIO0, data GPIO1 · ESP32-C3: button GPIO9, data GPIO21
- chipset
- ESP8285H16 (ESP8266, 2MB) or ESP32-C3 (4MB) — variant selectable at purchase
- max current
- 3 A per output (both variants) — roughly 50 WS2812B pixels at full white before separate power injection is needed
- power input
- 5-12 V DC (ESP8285H16 variant) or 5-24 V DC (ESP32-C3 variant)
- strip support
- WS2811, WS2812B, WS2814, SK6812, UCS8903, GS8298, TM1814, LPD6803, P9813, TM1829, UCS8904