How To Make a LED F1 Circuit With Animation

"I have been a long-time F1 fan. Since moving to this new place, I have been wondering how to decorate my nook area. A lot of the space has been occupied by my giant racing simulator, so why not put a race track on the wall?

In my usual style, a shiny, colorful track with LED lights would cut it and that may also keep my wife out of it. 

But which track? There are a bunch of cool F1 tracks that just won’t fit in this space; they are usually too long or too flat. I ended up choosing my childhood track: the Shanghai International Circuit.

I have two options:

1. Buy the race track from Etsy and tape it around with LED lights (cheap and easy).
2. Get a LED rope and shape it into a track, program some animation to simulate the running race cars (expensive and hard).

The choice is obvious; now we need to gather the materials. I ended up choosing Govee RGBIC Neon Rope Light, 16.4ft. I want consistent lighting across the track, and Govee also provides decent customization options for the lights.

To begin, I need to form the shape of an F1 circuit based on the length of the rope: 16.4ft.  Now, come to think of it, it’s a bit harder than it looks.

I downloaded the track map from Wikipedia

This version is pretty cool and accurate. I also love how it marks the DRS zones in different colors. I roughly know the width would be 4-5 A4 pages across, so I set the scale of the track based on the print preview. Once it’s about 4 A4 pages wide, I need to trace the shape in Photoshop and get the perimeter value.

Steps i took: 

1. I first removed the pitstop and stand and all of those. 
2. Used the pen tool to trace the shape of the circuit. 
3. Went to Image > Analysis > Set Measurement Scale and chose a measurement scale preset. 
4. Chose Image > Analysis > Record Measurements. 
5. And then you will get the perimeter of the selection.

Now, the initial number doesn’t really matter; it could be something like 84. We just need to print it out on the A4. Once I had the printout, I connected them like puzzles, traced the track using a string, and measured the string length, let’s say 175. So the actual size in Photoshop should be:

(196.8 / 175) * 84 = 94

So now I just need to scale the shape 12% larger and go to: Record Measurements again. As long as it’s close to 94, we are good.

Now we print out the track again, and that should be our final shape of the track.

I then mount the track on the wall, mount the clips, and bend the rope according to the shape.

Here's the final result:

Here's the planned map vs final product, i love how Govee lets you customize the segment to reflect the DRS zones

Also check out the running cars on the track (using Govee's custom animation with different colors representing different F1 Teams