So… I’ve been working from the theory that they must be using an existing LED driver chip/protocol/library, and just trying to learn everything I can about that area of communication. You have no idea how many technical spec sheets I’ve read over the past week. -__-
Mind you, this is way out of my wheelhouse, so take everything with a grain of salt here:
Above: That’s what the wave looks like while the blade is on. The ending is slightly unique to each color. Spork used a logic analyzer to get the data into Pulseview.
After trying to read the data line with an Arduino, and then reading 100 wiki articles, I think it’s using some kind of UART serial protocol. Maybe some flavor of NRZ with a weird baud rate.
The UART and OOK decoding in the above screenshot are just the programs default versions of the protocol, and not entirely accurate.
Now here’s where things get crazy: I google today to see if there’s any suppliers or “4 pin LED pcb toy” boards, since it seems really unusual of a product component. I found one: It’s of similar design to the DAK Rivers of Light wand released two years ago!
Long story short: I think the sabers are using the same LED library as the Magic Your Way/Glow With the Show products.
Since Pulseview’s decoding is funky, I noted all the waves into binary by hand, then inverted the bits and converted them to hex. They seem to match the general protocol of GWTS, but not sure yet until it can be tested tomorrow.
So… TLDR; there’s a very slight chance we can send new commands/colors/animation to the blade if it’s really sharing the same codebase with GWTS.
VERY SLIGHT CHANCE, but still an interesting lead.
Some GWTS Protocol Reference Links: