Public Service Notice

There are multiple versions of the WS2812B programmable LEDs.

The World Semi website currently only has the datasheet of the latest one (they call it V4).

But if you google for “WS2812B datasheet”, this one from Adafruit is the top ranked result. That’s the old one.

The old one requires an idle time (“reset”) of 50us or more. On the new one, that has been increased to 280us. That makes them backwards incompatible…

Guess which one I had been developing for first, and what happened when I connected a different LED board?

You can distinguish old and new by the pattern inside the LED eye:

WS2812B Old and New

The complete timing tables:

Old

WS2812B Old Timings

New

WS2812B New Timings

This blog post goes into more detail about difference between the old and the new version.