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ledthemfight
A controller for addressable LED strings. It runs on Raspberry Pi hardware; LED strings are connected directly to GPIO pins. It is easy to use and customize through its built-in web server.
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In my own quest of making things simple for end-users, I actually developed a software (https://github.com/mbevand/ledthemfight) so that an end-user can easily create custom effects in 1 or 2 lines of Python on a Raspberry Pi with GPIO pins directly connected to an LED strip (demo: https://youtu.be/qpd2rILsnM4). However the user still has to make custom wire connections to pins, and the underlying library I use (rpi_ws281x) only supports 2 channels of WS281x LEDs, and the library doesn't support the new Pi 5 yet. But with a (tiny, lighter-sized) USB controller that plugs in the Pi's USB ports, it would be more user-friendly, reliable, and expandable (plug any number of controllers!).
This is a long, long way from a solution to your stated desires, but in the interests of gauging the lay of the land you may want to look at my (long neglected, and written when I was fairly new to FastLED/C++/Processing/Java) LEDpijp project.