[leggomylibro]

Well, there's an ESP8266 board called the "PixelBlaze" which is designed for driving these LEDs, but I don't think the firmware is open source:

https://www.bhencke.com/pixelblaze

This page seems to have more information about a couple of different methods - apparently it's also possible to use a UART peripheral:

https://github.com/Makuna/NeoPixelBus/wiki/ESP8266-NeoMethod...