Your capture, told as a story.
Drop in a Zigbee or Bluetooth LE packet capture and get back one web page that tells you what actually happened on the air: who was there, who joined, what they said, and what looks wrong, with the frame numbers behind every claim.
Checks first, then the story
- What looks wrong, first. Rule-based checks read every frame: refused reporting configuration, a radio repeating itself into silence, a firmware update that downloaded completely and still never applied, a pairing that was asked to be tap-proof and was not. Each finding carries its frame numbers. Checks that pass are listed too.
- The story. The whole capture retold as plain paragraphs. One toggle switches between Beginner wording and full Engineer detail (addresses, opcodes, thresholds) on the same page.
- Watch it happen. An animated sequence diagram of the distilled events. A six-hour firmware transfer with 67,598 frames stays watchable, because high-volume traffic collapses into counted phases.
- Ask the capture. A question box that answers only from the frames in the file, and tells you plainly when the recording cannot answer.
- Honest limits, printed in every report. What that specific capture cannot tell you is computed and stated: sealed payloads, joins that happened before the recording started, a file that was cut short.
The checks from a real 67,598-frame firmware update capture: the update downloaded completely, and the device still runs the old version.
The sequence player and event table from the same capture.
Private by design
Packet captures can contain live network keys and everything your devices said. So Packet Story has no server and no upload. It is a small program you run on your own machine; dissection is done by tshark, the command-line half of Wireshark, on your computer. Close the tab and nothing remains anywhere.
Requirements and honest limits
- Needs: Python 3.8 or newer, and Wireshark (tshark) installed. Windows, macOS and Linux.
- Protocols in v1.0: Zigbee (IEEE 802.15.4) and Bluetooth LE.
- Without the network key, an encrypted Zigbee capture is read from structure only: addresses, commands, sizes, retries and timing. The report says so instead of guessing at sealed contents.
- Text packet logs are not read yet. Save the traffic as .pcapng from Wireshark and run the tool on that.
- Two sample captures are bundled, so the first run takes a minute.
Get Packet Story v1.0
Free. Leave your email and the download appears. You also join the Bit to Board newsletter (new tools, new guides, new courses; no spam, unsubscribe anytime). The tool itself needs no account and never phones home.
The email gate is a newsletter signup, nothing more: no account is created for the tool, and the zip is a plain file on this site.
Why free
Packet Story is the analysis workflow from the Zigbee, Engineered course, the one used to dissect real failure captures frame by frame, turned into a tool anyone can run. It is free because tools like this are how engineers find Bit to Board. If it saves you an afternoon, the courses are how you get more afternoons back.