this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026
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Sniffing WS2812 (Neopixel) bus? (beehaw.org)
submitted 2 days ago by GandalfDG@beehaw.org to c/askelectronics@discuss.tchncs.de
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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.

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[–] GandalfDG@beehaw.org 3 points 2 days ago

fortunately the RP2040's programmable IO can run at 40x that 3MHz rate, so with a working program I should be able to differentiate short and long pulses and convert them back to bits. My application shouldn't need to know exact colors, rather just detecting certain patterns or an on/off threshold state for a specific light in the chain.