It wasn’t long after the advent of addressable RGB LEDs that LED rings began to appear. Even though they are commonplace, we still think that these circles of glowing wonder are a spectacle to behold. They are usually pretty big, often starting at around 36mm in diameter and increasing upwards in size, limited perhaps only to what you can afford! MakeTVee has gone the other way and has come up with this excellent set of LED PCB rings that are only 18mm in diameter.
Sold as a pack of 4, these little rings each have 8 WS2812C addressable LEDs mounted onto a 1mm thick PCB. Due to the small package size of the LEDs, the internal diameter of the ring is 10mm. On the back of each ring, there are solder pads for a 5V supply and ground as well as data in and out which means you can easily chain together multiple rings.
There’s a tantalising mention in the description that you could use these rings to build “Tiny LED balloons”. We weren’t familiar with this project but Maketvee included a link to @ItsMrHJP on Twitter who is building these beautiful model balloons using LEDs and edge-emitting optical fibres. We’d also bet that people have more technical uses for these; a first thought here was that they might make excellent light rings for tiny FPV-type camera systems. Whatever you choose, we look forward to seeing what the Tindie community uses these for!
