Today I'll be using a 74AHCT125N quad level-shifter to use a 5V 24 neoPixel ring with my Arduino Nano Connect. It is on pin 4.
That part was pretty easy. Wiring followed the adafruit reference. The only problem was sending the programmable input/output (PIO) state machine commands from one of the cores. This would cause animations to stall while running CPU-heavy instructions. I could run it on core0 since it will just be handling BLE communications. I would like it to be able to run the lights in some preset animations. Ideally independently while taking some FIFO interrupts from the main core. PIOs are capable of looping small snippets. I've only used PIOs once before using a Pi Pico and micropython.References:
https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/pico/raspberry-pi-pico-c-sdk.pdf
https://raspberrypi.github.io/pico-sdk-doxygen/group__hardware__pio.html
https://learn.adafruit.com/neopixels-on-raspberry-pi/raspberry-pi-wiring
https://github.com/MrYsLab/NeoPixelConnect
https://forum.arduino.cc/t/programming-pio-with-pico/704290
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/795286/what-does-the-question-mark-character-mean-in-c