A 24 pixel LED Ring Animations Driven by Raspberry Pi Pico 2

This project is built to support my YouTube channel DrJonEA and is an extension of project tutorials provided in full on my Udemy course Pico Micro Projects in C++.

This project is design for a Raspberry Pi Pico 2. You can find a video walk through on my YouTube channel:

Connection

A WS2812B LED Ring of 24 pixels is connected via a 470ohm resistor to GPIO 18 on the Pico. I run my LED ring at 5Volts which means I also put this through a signal level shifter to go from the 3.3v to 5volts.

The LED ring I provide power and ground directly from the Pico VBUS and GND, VBUS being 5Volts from the USB cable. I also use a 1, 000uF capacitor across the LED ring as the jump in current draw can brown out the Pico.

Clone and build

Clone the repo using the command git clone --recurse-submodules as I have used submodule libraries for the management of the LED ring.

To build using the Raspberry Pi Pico SDK use the commands:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

On Windows you may wish to use ninja instead of make. Depends how your tool chain is setup.