I manage all my ESP nodes via the esphome commandline on a windows laptop, no usage of the esphome dashboard within HA. I only tried the Arduino serial monitor for that though. The USB2Serial bridge still does pop up in the windows device manager of my laptop when I connect the board, but I wasn’t able to get any log output from COM4. # Enable fallback hotspot (captive portal) in case wifi connection fails But as mentioned: I wasn’t even able to flash the last version because the connection to the device doesn’t work anymore. The working version was exactly this, without the last 5 lines for the effect. Ground is the pin right next to it, and for Data I use pin 25. I use this setup for another project where the dedicated 3.3V are not enough, with a 433mhz sender and receiver, there it works like a charm (but obviously with way less current draw). Power for the ring comes from the VIN pin, this one is connected to the 5V line of the USB connector with a SS12 diode inbetween.

I found a lot of examples on the web where in small projects the power for the LEDs comes directly from the ESPs, and additional power source was mostly used for big project with multiple meters of LED strips, but I’m now still wondering if my setup fried the ESP board. The board also showed up as unavailable in HA and my router showed it as offline (no IP assigned), and therefore I also cannot connect to it via WiFi (anymore). When I then wanted to add an effect to the YAML, the esphome commandline wasn’t able to connect to the board via USB anymore after compiling.

After setting up a 12-LED WS2812B ring with my DOIT Devkit V1 board, it worked perfectly fine for 15-20 minutes (including HA integration, changing colours and brightness, switching it on and off etc from the UI).

Doit esp32 devkit v1 fritzing