Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The future of Rebble

rebble.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 28 posts

Re: The future of Rebble

#11

Post by Avamander »

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #4

I'm curious if anyone has tried one of the newer e-ink smart watches you see on Alibaba, which use ESP-32 or other low-power SOCs. I saw one recently at a meet-up and the guy who was wearing claimed it was completely open-source and he could run whatever he wanted to on it. It did not have heartrate monitoring or anything other than clock on it, as far as I could tell.

The biggest issue is the software. It's mostly abysmal. The best effort I've seen so far has been InfiniTime for the PineTime. It's very difficult without full-time employees working on improving things.

Re: The future of Rebble

#12

Post by HaZeust »

dang wrote: post #2

Well now we have a conundrum - the top 3 posts on the frontpage are all about this! The submitted title of this post was "Google has open-sourced the pebble smartwatch operating system" but it actually points to https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html , so I've changed the title and moved the comments from here to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070 , which has the Google announcement. The 3…

Good exercise of your sequence priority philosophy, but I also think they all have their own right to be posted and discussed - this is exciting, and different angles and POVs can be brought to each thread. One is about Google's affairs with Pebble, one is about the community-grown Rebble, and one is about the founding team of the original Pebble itself.

Re: The future of Rebble

#13

Post by MostlyStable »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #9
MostlyStable wrote: post #5

Some commenters mentioned that the e-ink screen (and the accompanying battery life) was one reason why the Pebble is so beloved, which reminded me of the Basis Peak, which was primarily a health tracker watch with some (very limited) smart functionality (mostly just some notifications, if I recall), that also had an e-ink screen and a nearly 1 week battery life and had a sort of similar trajectory: Bought by Intel, t…

Pebble had an LCD screen. It didn't use Eink at all. You can look this up, it was an LCD display manufactured by Sharp.

I never had one, but doing some quick googling, it looks like at least some models had an e-ink display. Certainly several commenters seemed to think it did.

Re: The future of Rebble

#15

Post by will0 »

freedomben wrote: post #10

I'm a little confused at the moving pieces here. We have RePebble, Rebble, and PebbleOS. PebbleOS is the easy one. OS recently opened by Google. But how are RePebble and Rebble related? Are they the same thing? Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble, or are they the same effort? Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble?

Rebble is the open source infra that has been keeping Pebbles alive since ~2016. See: rebble.io and https://github.com/pebble-dev

(Disclaimer: I'm part of the team)

RePebble is a new thing by Eric, the original founder of Pebble and is unrelated to Rebble.

> Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble?

Potentially! We have always talked about it, but some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plans are still being discussed.

> Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble?

Remains to be seen, but if I had to guess it's unlikely.

Re: The future of Rebble

#16

Post by will0 »

MostlyStable wrote: post #13
ClassyJacket wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pebble had an LCD screen. It didn't use Eink at all. You can look this up, it was an LCD display manufactured by Sharp.

I never had one, but doing some quick googling, it looks like at least some models had an e-ink display. Certainly several commenters seemed to think it did.

It was a transflective memory LCD, which Pebble marketed as "E-Paper" (not the same as E-Ink)

Re: The future of Rebble

#17

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

MostlyStable wrote: post #13
ClassyJacket wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pebble had an LCD screen. It didn't use Eink at all. You can look this up, it was an LCD display manufactured by Sharp.

I never had one, but doing some quick googling, it looks like at least some models had an e-ink display. Certainly several commenters seemed to think it did.

No, it had an "epaper" display that visually looked a lot like eink but was a different technology

Re: The future of Rebble

#18

Post by subarctic »

freedomben wrote: post #10

I'm a little confused at the moving pieces here. We have RePebble, Rebble, and PebbleOS. PebbleOS is the easy one. OS recently opened by Google. But how are RePebble and Rebble related? Are they the same thing? Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble, or are they the same effort? Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble?

There's also the Pebble watch which I believe was the thing that this all comes from originally? Just piecing this together from all the HN posts now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)

Re: The future of Rebble

#19

Post by bigiain »

throwup238 wrote: post #7
TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #4

I'm curious if anyone has tried one of the newer e-ink smart watches you see on Alibaba, which use ESP-32 or other low-power SOCs. I saw one recently at a meet-up and the guy who was wearing claimed it was completely open-source and he could run whatever he wanted to on it. It did not have heartrate monitoring or anything other than clock on it, as far as I could tell.

The original was Watchy: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/ Not only can you run anything you want on it but it supports the Arduino IDE and Micropython. I assume all of the Alibaba ones are based off of Watchy.

I have one of this still in it's box unassembled.

I like the idea. But I've been wearing mechanical watches for about a decade now...

Re: The future of Rebble

#20

Post by dang »

HaZeust wrote: post #12
dang wrote: post #2

Well now we have a conundrum - the top 3 posts on the frontpage are all about this! The submitted title of this post was "Google has open-sourced the pebble smartwatch operating system" but it actually points to https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html , so I've changed the title and moved the comments from here to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070 , which has the Google announcement. The 3…

Good exercise of your sequence priority philosophy, but I also think they all have their own right to be posted and discussed - this is exciting, and different angles and POVs can be brought to each thread. One is about Google's affairs with Pebble, one is about the community-grown Rebble, and one is about the founding team of the original Pebble itself.

I agree! though it's usually hard for the comments to stay partitioned that way.
Post reply on HN