Sniffing WS2812 (Neopixel) bus? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 month 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 1 points 1 month ago

looking at the schematics of the device I want to monitor more closely, it looks like it's actually using addressable LEDs with a two-wire protocol, which actually makes things even easier because I can just sample on the provided clock edges. I think these are colloquially DotStar rather than NeoPixel devices. For reference I'm designing some mods for a modern pinball machine and it would be useful to know the state of lights on the playfield since I can't hook into the code directly.

this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2026

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