Dave Plummer Gives His Truck a Major Lighting Upgrade with a Microcontrolled Sequential Control Bar

Designed to boost visibility, this rear light strip offers a range of modes — from animated turn signals to high-intensity illumination.

Gareth Halfacree
3 years agoAutomotive / Lights / HW101

Developer Dave Plummer has put together a microcontroller-based upgrade for his truck, offering sequential tail light animation — with variants built around the Microchip ATmega328P and the Espressif ESP32.

Compatible, Plummer claims, with any pick-up truck or sports utility vehicle (SUV), the lighting upgrade takes the form of a weather-rated individually addressable WS2812B RGB LED strip mounted to the rear of the vehicle and connected to a PCB housed in a sealed box with cable grommets.

This LED strip offers a major lighting upgrade to a GMC pick-up truck. (📹: Dave Plummer)

Designed to boost visibility over stock lighting, the tail light system has several modes. In its base mode, it flashes an animated pulse in the direction of turn indication — synchronized automatically to the flash rate of the factor indicators. If the brake lights are triggered, it starts with a brief and eye-catching strobe before settling into a fixed illumination.

In the event of a hazard, or any other reason to activate the vehicle's hazard warning lights, the strip switches into hazard mode: a bright strobe that expands outwards from the center of the bumper, again synchronized to the factor lighting system's cadence. In backup mode, the LEDs are switched into a high-brightness illumination mode — drawing an impressive 43W — to provide improved visibility.

There's even an "emergency strobes" section, alternating blue and red to mimic police and other emergency service vehicles — though anyone triggering that particular mode may want to check their local regulations for legality.

Plummer has indicated that he's built two variants of the upgrade, one based on an ATmega328P microcontroller and the other on an ESP32 — but has yet to share design files or source code. Additional information is available in the project's Reddit thread and on the accompanying YouTube video for the ESP32 variant.

Gareth Halfacree
Freelance journalist, technical author, hacker, tinkerer, erstwhile sysadmin. For hire: freelance@halfacree.co.uk.
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