this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026
6 points (100.0% liked)

Ask Electronics

4102 readers
2 users here now

For questions about component-level electronic circuits, tools and equipment.

Rules

1: Be nice.

2: Be on-topic (eg: Electronic, not electrical).

3: No commercial stuff, buying, selling or valuations.

4: Be safe.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
DavideAndrea@discuss.tchncs.de
linker3000@discuss.tchncs.de
6
Sniffing WS2812 (Neopixel) bus? (beehaw.org)
submitted 2 days ago by GandalfDG@beehaw.org to c/askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de
6 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Going to try my hand at sniffing the data driving a WS2812 chain for some future projects, and I'm wondering if anyone has tried this or knows of any existing resources for doing this. I'm fairly confident I can implement it with some RP2040 PIO since I have some pi pico boards laying around. Web searches for the topic aren't turning up much of use, just a billion tutorials for driving the bus.

My only concern that might pose a problem is if the GPIO pins introduce noise or create other issues on the bus I'm trying to observe.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The WS2812 only runs at 800kbps. That's well within the capabilities of one of those 24 MHz FX2 based USB logic analyzers that you can get for less than $10. Sigrok has a protocol decoder for the WS2812 LEDs.

[–] GandalfDG@beehaw.org 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

well, it's more being able to detect long vs. short pulses, as it's not the logic level but the pulse width that encodes the bits.

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 days ago

With a 24MHz sample rate, there will be 30 samples per bit. The narrowest a pulse for the WS2812 can be is 220 ns, which will be about 5 samples. That's more than enough to decode it.