Neat, I'm super excited! I've hoped the PineTime would be the new Pebble, but hasn't really materialized (though, it has gotten pretty good! despite being a little awkward).
I actually held off from buying a Pebble back in the day because the software wasn't open source and I was worried about getting dependent on a product I had no control over. (Yes, I see the vicious Tragedy of the Commons wrapped up there, but still gotta make the optimal choice for me). I'm beyond stoked to see this movement! And it being open source, I have no such qualms. If they are affordable enough, I'll probably be gifting these out on the regular so expect to sell at least a dozen or two :-D
forgot the name of the watch but it had an lcd display to save battery and a full touchscreen around 2017? i ended up using the lcd display mostly for HB and walk distance. it would be great if we had a completely e-ink based pebble watch with backlighting (lcd display was great but couldn't be viewed in the dark :/)
Oh this is awesome. Are you involved with repebble directly?
I still have my time round in a drawer somewhere. I moved to a galaxy watch, which is great for being able to play Spotify offline, GPS etc, but like all modern smart watches is terrible for bloat and a screen that's responsible for like 70% of the power draw.
It's really disheartening that the average consumer only sees the shiny oled and slick animations and doesn't think at all about the inconvenience of charging at least once a day...
Which Pebble are you bringing back? I ask because Pebble 2 was the sweet spot for me with a heart rate monitor but the heart rate monitor is not in this repo.
The HRM aspect is mostly a small binary blob that ought to be fairly straightforward to re-integrate. The far larger issue is the lack of a Bluetooth stack.
May I ask why it was so special for you? As I did not participate in all the hype and now I'm a happy owner of a Garmin watch and it does seem like it is closer in specs to Pebble than most other smartwatches. Other than the openness.
There is apparently huge amounts of goodwill for Pebble!
But. Isn’t most of the value of a codebase like this not the code itself, but all the knowledge of the people who worked on it day to day? Where are they?
It’s really intriguing. People who have a lot of goodwill towards Pebble BELIEVE the source code is valuable. That doesn’t mean that it is.
Oh this is awesome news. The Pebble was by far the best smartwatch I've ever used. No quirks, just always reliable. The hard work shone through with how quirk free it was.
It was dead long before Google was involved. Pebble filed for insolvency back in 2016 with Fitbit acquiring much of the assets. It was dead at this point. 5 years later Google bought Fitbit.
Presumably the source included the TTF files from which the rasterized bitmap resources were automatically generated. Including the pre-rasterized bitmaps extracted from a previous release should not be a problem as typefaces and bitmap fonts are not subject to copyright in the US, vs vector font files which are eligible for copyright as computer programs.
The Bluetooth stack, except for a stub that will function in an emulator
This seems unfortunate, and looks to be one of the most critical gaps in the source release.
The STM peripheral library
You can get this from ST no problem, although it is only licensed for use on STM devices.
The voice codec
It should be feasible enough to replace this.
ARM CMSIS
The old versions with non-free licenses are still available from ARM or ST, and the recent versions are Apache licensed (but some porting of code might be required to use to newer versions).
For the Pebble 2 HR, the heart rate monitor driver
This was probably based on sample code from the vendor which could be replaced.
Old versions of CMSIS had a weird "only for use with ARM hardware" license header, which also carried through into most BSPs. I don't think this was resolved until around CMSIS 4, so it might just be a matter of front porting since it looks like normal STM32 stuff which is mostly permissively licensed now.
I remember reading that the Bluetooth stack was one of the main differentiators for Pebble at the time due to its reliability, shame it's not included here.
In 2014, that certainly was true. Every open source Bluetooth stack (i.e., Android, Linux and FreeBSD) was buggy and unreliable. Since then they rewrote the Bluetooth stack in Android twice, and finally what's in AOSP is quite comprehensive and reliable. It's now been merged into ChromeOS as well.
I feel like it's the same about many of the items mentioned above, the free/libre offering in that space are a lot more polished than was the case 9-10 years ago. Back then the audio codec was still a patent encumbered minefield, now you can just use opus. The quality and diversity of free fonts is ordered of magnitudes above what it was 10 years ago.
In short, it should be much easier for Eric to fill those gaps with free/open offerings than it was 10 years ago.
This, Google Wave, Tilt Brush (and more recently Blocks). And probably others I've forgotten.
This really does help mitigate the damage done by "Killed by Google" and people are genuinely grateful (personally in my case).
But even better would be to fix the dysfunctional internal dynamics that cause this syndrome in what appears to be disproportionally more frequently compared to other corporations.
That's what happens when you don't have to play by the rules of reality. Googles monopoly allows them to act like this. It's unfair and generally bad for everyone involved. Thankfully it seems that that era is finally going to end
> It's unfair and generally bad for everyone involved.
The solution is simple - don't hop on Google's new products (there's a risk with the older ones as well, albeit smaller). It's just not worth it to invest your money and time with such a significant risk of it getting killed (and its general half-assedness). There are usually alternatives.
Sorry, what? Depreciating a product has never been illegal in America. Consumer protections are an afterthought, and that applies to Google as much as it applies to Apple and Microsoft. You aren't owed shit.
The rules of reality are written the moment you click "agree" on the EULA. Like the other comment says; the only way to win is to refuse buying things you don't own. Otherwise you're just a sucker who has a hard time living down their mistakes.
Eh, I take a much more "gloves off" approach to this mentality. If you bought an Airport thinking that it would be your forever router, you're a moron. Same goes for buying an eero, or Google Home, or even an iPad at this point. You don't own this hardware, you control nothing about it. The idea that products live forever is a bedtime story we tell ourselves, an utter fairytale of the software industry.
Everyone kills software products. The problem is our attitude of entitlement towards things we sign an EULA to use. You "own" TikTok on the App Store? Pssh, please. You don't even own the software runtime you use TikTok with.
As a Pebble user to this day (I'm wearing one right now in fact) this is amazing! I'm hopeful that this leads to development and fixes on these old devices that haven't been possible until now.
And who knows, maybe we could even see new smartwatches running a derivative of the Pebble OS at some point? The old hardware's great but since they're not being made anymore it's only a matter of time before they break down.
Good for them, but also, what a colossal waste. Fitbit brought Pebble, Google brought Fitbit. They had everything to make a better version of a product that people _loved_, that _I_ loved. And what had them done? Nothing but a blatant display of anticompetitive power. (Yes I am still mad, 8 years later)
The title is misleading.
Proprietary code has been removed
from the repo and the published
repo will not compile because of it.
Google states:
"" This is for information only.""
""This is the latest version of the internal
repository from Pebble Technology providing
the software to run on Pebble watches.
Proprietary source code has been removed
from this repository and it will not
compile as-is""
This is pretty awesome. I had a Pebble but the battery went out and was sad to see that you had to buy used / refurbished. Being epaper and lasting for so long the best part of it was that it just managed notifications with my phone. I moved on to the Apple Watch from my brother (series 0) and it took awhile for the Apple Watch to have its killer application which was a fitness tracker.
You can still get watches which use the same MIP display technology as the Pebble and run similar "smart-ish" software with very long battery life. They tend to be marketed more as fitness/sports watches rather than smartwatches though.
I love my transflective MIP Garmin Fenix watch, but it's not nearly as high-contrast as my wife's Kindle, which uses a reflective MIP e-paper display.
I would be an ideal candidate for a rePebble if I were not as happy as I am with my Garmin - though with their recent changes to inReach plans, crazy prices and lackluster features on the Fenix 8, and trend towards AMOLED displays (away from their roots, chasing the Apple watch market) they're not looking as amazing as they once did.
Every Pebble model used an LCD display. It being epaper has to be one of the most pervasive myths in tech history. It was a low powered, reflective LCD, so it did improve on other LCDs in those areas somewhat, but it wasn't eink technology.
Readit News
I wrote a blog post about our plans to bring Pebble back, sustainably. https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back
We got our original start on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3827868), it's a pleasure to be back.
If you're interested in getting a new Pebble, check out https://rePebble.com
We're bringing Pebble back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091 - Jan 2025 (1 comment)
The future of Rebble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 - Jan 2025 (3 comments)
I actually held off from buying a Pebble back in the day because the software wasn't open source and I was worried about getting dependent on a product I had no control over. (Yes, I see the vicious Tragedy of the Commons wrapped up there, but still gotta make the optimal choice for me). I'm beyond stoked to see this movement! And it being open source, I have no such qualms. If they are affordable enough, I'll probably be gifting these out on the regular so expect to sell at least a dozen or two :-D
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37221576
I still have my time round in a drawer somewhere. I moved to a galaxy watch, which is great for being able to play Spotify offline, GPS etc, but like all modern smart watches is terrible for bloat and a screen that's responsible for like 70% of the power draw.
It's really disheartening that the average consumer only sees the shiny oled and slick animations and doesn't think at all about the inconvenience of charging at least once a day...
But. Isn’t most of the value of a codebase like this not the code itself, but all the knowledge of the people who worked on it day to day? Where are they?
It’s really intriguing. People who have a lot of goodwill towards Pebble BELIEVE the source code is valuable. That doesn’t mean that it is.
Credit where it's due
Dead Comment
- All of the system fonts
- The Bluetooth stack, except for a stub that will function in an emulator
- The STM peripheral library
- The voice codec
- ARM CMSIS
- For the Pebble 2 HR, the heart rate monitor driver
It's worth noting that CMSIS itself is open source but some of the drivers for this hardware probably were not.
I feel like it's the same about many of the items mentioned above, the free/libre offering in that space are a lot more polished than was the case 9-10 years ago. Back then the audio codec was still a patent encumbered minefield, now you can just use opus. The quality and diversity of free fonts is ordered of magnitudes above what it was 10 years ago.
In short, it should be much easier for Eric to fill those gaps with free/open offerings than it was 10 years ago.
This really does help mitigate the damage done by "Killed by Google" and people are genuinely grateful (personally in my case).
But even better would be to fix the dysfunctional internal dynamics that cause this syndrome in what appears to be disproportionally more frequently compared to other corporations.
The solution is simple - don't hop on Google's new products (there's a risk with the older ones as well, albeit smaller). It's just not worth it to invest your money and time with such a significant risk of it getting killed (and its general half-assedness). There are usually alternatives.
The rules of reality are written the moment you click "agree" on the EULA. Like the other comment says; the only way to win is to refuse buying things you don't own. Otherwise you're just a sucker who has a hard time living down their mistakes.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
RIP Google Wave... I had such high hopes when it was first released... :'(
Everyone kills software products. The problem is our attitude of entitlement towards things we sign an EULA to use. You "own" TikTok on the App Store? Pssh, please. You don't even own the software runtime you use TikTok with.
And who knows, maybe we could even see new smartwatches running a derivative of the Pebble OS at some point? The old hardware's great but since they're not being made anymore it's only a matter of time before they break down.
Props to Google on this.
Google states: "" This is for information only.""
""This is the latest version of the internal repository from Pebble Technology providing the software to run on Pebble watches. Proprietary source code has been removed from this repository and it will not compile as-is""
I love my transflective MIP Garmin Fenix watch, but it's not nearly as high-contrast as my wife's Kindle, which uses a reflective MIP e-paper display.
I would be an ideal candidate for a rePebble if I were not as happy as I am with my Garmin - though with their recent changes to inReach plans, crazy prices and lackluster features on the Fenix 8, and trend towards AMOLED displays (away from their roots, chasing the Apple watch market) they're not looking as amazing as they once did.