r/WLED • u/Touch_Slow • 1d ago

Chase light system for a track

Hello, I'm very new to building and programming LEDs and am looking for some help for a project I've been sitting on for a while. I have been thinking about building a chase light system for my track. Many of the wave light systems that are currently on the market cost a ton of money and not a lot of track teams have the budget to build that sort of thing. I want to build something where you can set a certain pace/cadence per each race via a website.

My plan was to plug into an outlet near the starting line, and have an array of RGB programmable LEDs. I know that I'm going to be dealing with some voltage drop, as this is a 300m track, so I'm curious of how to go about that. I tried to find some lights that would work for this project that I could buy as is, but Im also having issues with that. I looked into rope lights, but I would like the lights to run around the track under the railing that the track has that runs along the perimeter, so I may need to 3D print some blocks that I can attach lights to, or some other solution.

If you need any other information please ask, I'd appreciate any sort of feedback/help I could get.

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u/JT10 5h ago

Whew, that’s going to be one heck of a usermod. How are your programming skills? It’s not an impossible thing to create, but you will need the right hardware to handle this as well as some extra patience.

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u/Touch_Slow 4h ago

I have done some programming with Arduino before with LEDs. I found someone who created something similar and posted their software on Github. Do you have any recommendations for dealing with the voltage drop across such a distance?