So my Neewer 176-LED unit arrived - larger than the Aputure unit but significantly cheaper ($48 instead of $90, and I got mine even cheaper than that during Amazon’s Prime Early Access sale). See above for the Amazon link to what I bought.
It uses BLE and not Bluetooth SPP - but with an HCI snoop log from my Android phone it wasn’t too hard to reverse engineer anyway. I’ve got a python script that can rotate hue in 120 degree increments on my laptop now. I’ll clean it up and turn it into a module and push it to github sometime next week. I don’t know if it is the unit or the “bleak” python module ( GitHub - hbldh/bleak: Bluetooth Low Energy platform Agnostic Klient for Python ), but controlling it from a laptop is really flaky/unreliable. Does not seem to affect the phone, so I’m guessing it is a problem in bleak.
An interesting observation in mine - the white LED phosphors parasitically energize from the blue LEDs in the RGB array to a small degree.
One minor disadvantage of the unit I bought is that local control is utter garbage - dimming and some basic mode changes.