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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[โ€“] 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.

[โ€“] 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.