I’ve never owned a scope before and bought one on a whim — it turns out to be hideously difficult to use.
What else to test it out on but some WS2812—
After five minutes of fiddling I got something that looks remotely like I expect it should.
Hi, I bough the same one. You’ll get better results, when you use the digital inputs of the DSO (the green & pink one).
Ahh yeah— that’s much better! The picture now relates to the datasheet!
What scope did you get? I’ve got a logic 16 which I love for the logic probe side of it, but i’ve had more things go on recently where having a full blown scope would be a Good Thing[tm].
I’m currently inclined to get a Logic Pro 8, going back and forth on whether or not I will still wanted a dedicated scope even with that.
Catching digital signals on a scope is always trial and error if it doesn’t have built in decoding. Usually with my Hantek dso5102b I just set it for single shot capture where it just grabs one buffer worth of data and stops. You can then scroll around and zoom in as you need. It is a balance between waveform resolution and length of recording, too far out and you record a longer sequence but you lose detail in shape and transients when you zoom in. If you are too far in you get great detail but a small length of sample time.
@Daniel_Garcia I’m pretty sure this thing is a piece of junk compared to a proper oscilloscope — it goes by the model “DS203” — tiny handheld thing.
It’s good enough for me to see that stuff is happening etc — I wouldn’t trust it for measuring anything.
In digital mode I was quite thrilled to be able to see and measure the WS2812 data and see it matching the datasheet. As mentioned above — probably quite trivial.
Well that may be but like you say it’s good enough for you to see what’s happening, that’s the important thing. One of the most helpful things in troubleshooting is being able to visualize what’s going on.
@michael_hillpot t totally— I just mean in comparison— it’s actually just cryptically difficult to use
I just got my Logic Pro8 - this thing is fantastic to have, and will probably tide me over until I get a full blown dedicated scope. Still - very useful when debugging, oh, say, mixing up 5v WS2812 leds w/3.3v pin outputs (I’m looking at you, Teensy 3.1!)
Also - I can do things like dedicate a pin to telling the scope when to start/stop recording, so I don’t have to worry about catching “the right moment” 
So I finally gave in and bought a proper oscilloscope — mainly for use in another project I’m working on (modular synth stuff)
It’s a Rigol DS1074Z — and it’s superb. Not really overly expensive and certainly caters for my modest needs and beyond.
@Daniel_Garcia I think you’ll like the SPI decoding! It’s rather nifty.