Thanks for the tip off.

I've updated the code to shift right by 3 places and so go back to a 5 bit number.

That's a neat way of limiting the power usage.

The actual string I have is three wires. Data and + - it’s likely they have been swapped out for cheaper lesds now, or the picture is wrong.

There are individually addressable leds that have their ‘address’ burned into them and use a ws2812-style protocol, it could be that. There will only be one continuous data wire, which is cheaper to assemble and resistant to single LED failures.

I looked at the picture again, it does show a three wire set up.

The WS2815 (12V version) actually is a 4 wire setup. It has a "backup data wire" that allows a single failed LED unit to be bypassed.

http://www.normandled.com/upload/201808/WS2815%20LED%20Datas...

Good idea! I’ll get the multimeter out.

Oooh! Good spot. I will check other commands and see if that length idea works out. I think it could.

That’s pretty typical of binary formats. That and offsets or addresses. And type tags. Assuming the payload isn’t compressed or encrypted, you can get pretty far assuming you’ll run into one of those eventually.

Anecdotally, earlier today I was trying to decipher Encarta data and came across the “Mind Maze” data and it’s mostly that - fixed 32-but header, question size, (answer size, answer, correct flag, something I haven’t figure out yet){4}. Then a separate file with an index value and an offset into the first file as well as a header I haven’t figured out yet.

I was trying to automate my BLE connected Christmas lights but instead I created e-waste. Now you can too!

Not sure what you did with it, but I found that some of this SmartTrash does a hard reset when you do some magic sequence such as quickly turning if off/on 5 times in a row.

If you want a more GUI-oriented way of doing BLE packet sniffing, try the nRF Connect app. Not sure about iPhone, but if you let it sit in the background on Android, you can pick up BLE activity from a nice little GUI on your phone. I use it every day.

you can still use them as dummy/classic lights if you bypass the controller

+1

I can just swap the micro controller with something like an ESP8266 and run WLED.

If you get into FastLED, try out the emulator I made – https://editor.soulmatelights.com/gallery/732-rainbow-conway

I haven't worked on it at all recently (COVID project) but it's fun for experimenting. You can also flash ESP32s from the downloadable desktop app

I bought a big spool of addressable lights from Aliexpress and hooked them up to an ESP32. Took some soldering and other hacking, but they’re really, really, nice.

I did this super similar (ESP32) with a set I got from walmart. Works great!

I find it amazing to think that your Christmas lights are now way more powerful than my first computer.

I think about stuff like this a lot, like what technologies I'm (ab)using to do some silly gadget thing.

Even though it's way more powerful than my first computer, it uses only a fraction of the energy. So yes, in a way maybe you're abusing a pretty powerful computer to do some silly gadget thing, but there's no real negative impact. I know what you mean though. I've only recently gotten into microcontrollers, and because of the time of year I've been thinking of Christmas lights too, and felt the same thing. Then again: I'm also using my M1 Macbook to write a comment on HN, which is only a fraction of what it can do.

Oh no negativity in the statement, I'm enjoying every second of it!

I haven't added any fault tolerance. Should be fairly easy to detect if a route is unavailable and re-write the routing table. And yes, I expect the Pi is still a bottleneck.

Is there any embedded hardware that can handle 140Mbps line speed without being maxed out?

Something like the Cubox-i/Hummingboard should do the trick. It has a beefier CPU and a gigabit ethernet interface that isn't attached via USB like the one on the Pi/Pi2.