A cocktail machine deserves lighting that looks as considered as the rest of the build, and this project tackles exactly that. The maker put together a lighting setup around a 16-LED addressable WS2812B ring, and the result is genuinely polished.
What stands out first is the physical integration. The ring sits flush in a circular carbon fiber disc, and that disc is recessed into a square block of pale wood. Flush-mounting addressable LEDs into a hard surface like carbon fiber takes patience, and the tidy finish is a credit to that patience. The contrast between the dark disc and the light wood is one detail I keep coming back to.
On the software side, the ring runs several pre-programmed animations. One is a smooth chase through the rainbow color wheel. The sequence also moves through rotating sweeps that alternate between green and red, then into twinkling multicolor moments. At one point the whole ring flashes green in sync, and later it pulses solid blue, before the rotating multicolor chase takes over again. That variety keeps a single 16-pixel ring from feeling repetitive, and in my view it is a smart use of limited pixels.
One open question remains for me: would the glow read differently through a cloudy drink than a clear one? An answer to that would help anyone planning a similar lighting setup of their own.