Hello,

I have made a few Arduino and ESP projects, but all of them were built on perfboard. Now I want to make my first project on a PCB.
It will be an ESP32 that drives a few WS2812B LEDs. All of it will be powered by 12 V DC.
Will my layout and PCB design work like this? What can I improve? (Probably a lot.)

Thanks a lot for help.

 

few things that need to be addressed:
power traces need to be wider. most common copper layers for PCB are 0.5 and 1 Oz/in^2. so your power traces should be in the 2-3mm range. what you have so far will likely act as fuse.

the ESP32 pins are not 5V tolerant. so driving devices powered by 5V from ESP32 requires level shifting. lots of online tutorials seem to suggest that driving these LEDs is ok if one adds 470 Ohm resistors between MCU and first LED.

never seen 470uF capacitor in such small form factor. also capacitor value of 470uF acros LEDs is way too much. this combines to some 50000uF and would likely prevent PSU (U15) to start... so you may want to check the datasheet. SMPS operates at high frequency and it is sensitive to capacitive load (capacitors are low impedance at high frequency). it is likely that C3 is already doing filtering job just fine. for bypass capacitors C5-C17 use 0.1uF which is readily available in 0805 or 0603 form factor. also bypass capacitors need to be placed as close as possible to the Vcc and GND pins of the device.

also U5, U6 are not powered. thy have via connected to nothing.

U1 has power via that connects to MCU pin. you need to use DRC.