WS2812 Headlight
Last updated: 31 Jan 2026 - 21:29
The PCB for this project was sponsored by PCBWay. While I was planning the project anyway, the choice to use their service was based primarily on the offer of a free board.
I'm working on a Hacky Racer, that is an electric go-kart type vehicle for a UK based racing competition. The budget is strictly limited to keep the competition field level, but one of the permitted extras is lights (they come under the safety category). For our racer we decided it would be fun to have some headlights that looked like eyes and could be animated. So while we wait for batteries to arrive for the project, I started a design.
The brief was to have something about 100mm diameter and that could display a range of patterns and animations. I had a reel of standard WS2812B LEDs (like Neopixels) so they seemed like an obvious choice. We want to be able to connect the lights into whatever battery we use so we wanted a wide range of input voltages (at least 12 to 48V), and we want the animation of the lights to be related to the vehicle, maybe they look left and right as we steer, so we needed some sort of comms.