Holiday Bauble: W2812B Rings and Pico

These WS2812B LED Rings are my basis for a simple holiday-themed build. Bringing animated lights to the festive seasons, all under the Pico’s control.

In the Video supporting this project, I show:

✅ How to connect up a WS2812B LED Ring

✅ Why you need a Logic Level Shifter

✅ Control LEDs individually

✅ Map the LEDs to a traditional square framebuffer

This WS2812B LED Ring uses 9 Rings of individually controllable LEDs. 241 LEDS in total from rings of 1+8+12+16+24+32+40+48+60 LEDS. That's too many LEDs to power from the Pico's 3volt supply so I use 5 Volts to power this from VBUS, basically the USB port. Then I need a logic level shift to connect one of the Pico's GPIO outputs at 3Volts up to a 5 volt signal to control the LEDs.

The perfect library to control these LEDs is by ForsakenNGS. Check it out here: https://github.com/ForsakenNGS/PicoLED

You can watch my video walk through of the project over on YouTube @DrJoNEA: