I was looking for LED gates for FPV drone racing, however all the gates for purchase online seemed too expensive so I decided to take a shot at designing my own (which like most of my other projects will likely end up being more expensive). The idea was to build an LED drone gate that could be easily disassembled for transport to the field and to be able to control the LEDs of multiple gates in the field with a mobile phone via wifi or bluetooth. The bars of the gate are lined with LED strips and controlled via a ESP32 running WLED.

The bars for the gate were printed with translucent PETG to give them some strength and flexibility. The joints were printed with PLA+ (any color, I used white), and the stand and circuit box holder can be printed with either PLA+ or PETG (I used black PLA+).

Supports are not needed for the base or joints, the WLED control box only needs supports on the brackets that stick out from the cover. The bars need support for the first 1-2 inches to anchor them to the bed but not the whole way up. Note that the bars are only angled to enable printing them longer than the 210mm of my print bed. To make a smaller gate, they can be shortened and printed flat on the bed with no supports. For PrusaSlicer users I've included the .3mf file for the bars which has the supports already painted on.

Recommend printing with 3 perimeters.

Warning: assembly requires some basic soldering as well as M2 thin square nuts and M2 screws.

The gate electronics and LEDs are powered by a USB battery pack which powers both the ESP32 and the LEDs. Since the LED strip consists of 5v addressable LEDs, a voltage level converter is required to step the 3.3v control output of the ESP32 up to 5v to address the individual LEDs.

In addition to the 3D printed parts you'll need the following components: Battery Pack (the control box is sized to hold this specific battery but can be remixed to hold others, recommend a 2.4A/5000mah pack) ESP32-WROOM-32D WS2812 LED strips (30/m) 3-pin RGB LED connectors Micro USB port 5v/3.3v voltage level converter 470 uF capacitor You'll also need 4 M2 thin square nuts (2 for the box cover and 2 for the USB port), 4 M2 screws, and some heat shrink tubing.

The ESP32's can be flashed with WLED for control via a mobile phone or any wifi-enabled device.

I'll try to add some additional shapes (square, circle, etc.) in the future.