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Good thing he isn't shipping from the US to Canada then, eh? Only the US-bound watches are shipped to the US. The rest go straight from Asia. Also, I'd be surprised if the Pebble company that was acquired by Fitbit was a Canadian company. I assume it was a US company.
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Pebble watches run on Cortex-M microcontrollers which have less than 1MB of flash storage and RAM, I like Kotlin multiplatform but getting it to run on them is extremely unlikely. I assume that for the foreseeable future Pebble apps will be only written in languages which are traditionally used for MCUs like Rust and C\C++
It is honestly refreshing to see constraints like this again. In my cloud infrastructure work (C++), we have gotten lazy. We bloat our containers because 'RAM is cheap'. Seeing a system designed to fit into 1MB reminds me that performance engineering used to be about efficiency, not just throwing more hardware at the problem.
Embedded is definitely a fun balance of what we could do and how much we can do.
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> Eric is doing is like the best possible outcome Slight correction, apparently Eric posting one of those WhatsApp screenshots was not okay with the person on the other side (who iirc is a rebble guy), who added that those grievances he had were taken out of context in the screenshot. The pebble (or rebble?) subreddit had this in the comments if anyone wants to read more. As always, the truth appears to lie somewhere…
Eh. imo this is a hard moral high ground to claim if you publicly (and falsely, as we now know) accuse someone of a crime and threaten legal action in a blog post
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I spent some time on their Discord chatting and trying to nudge them towards a healthier approach. Many of them seem to think that PebbleOS was released just for them (they quote the Google press release), and so reading between the lines I really do think they feel at some level that code has been "stolen" from them. Which is ridiculous (and I said so) but if they think it's true then it explains their actions much…
> they've been powering through the five stages of grief in coming to terms with that If only! They trashed their reputation by lashing out at their own misapprehensions.
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Exciting, except it runs Android Wear OS by Google instead of a deGoogled OS, and in the comments it says: "Repairability is admirable but only 3 years of security updates isn't near enough" FTA: "We’re also making sure that our new watches are more repairable than old Pebble watches. The back cover of Pebble Time 2 is screwed in. You can remove the back cover and replace the battery." So the battery of the Pebble Ti…
I had a few Pebbles back in the day and I loved them dearly - still have them laying around so the revival should be great if I can resurrect them. After Pebble went kaput, I got an Apple Watch through a work reward thing and honestly it’s been solid. I turned off a lot of notifications and mostly use it for things I really want to know, some light exercise tracking, time and weather.
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PDF link for those that are curious: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref... The general sentiment is that you cannot trust code you did not write yourself and that we need to be able to trust the person who did, but you can form your own conclusions about how that fits into the modern tech landscape.
One of the points made in that paper is that you can't even trust the compiler, even if you write the code yourself. I think this is one of the stronger points as it shows you it is unfeasible to require everybody to audit all source code before running it. Be pragmatic, know your threat model, decide who you trust and move on with more important things in your life. Full disclosure: am free software advocate.
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From the article: >Another important note - some binary blobs and other non-free software components are used today in PebbleOS and the Pebble mobile app (ex: the heart rate sensor on PT2 , Memfault library, and others). Optional non-free web services, like Wispr-flow API speech recognizer, are also used. These non-free software components are not required - you can compile and run Pebble watch software without them.…
100% of their own software.
As someone dealing with open-source compliance in distributed systems, the purity tests in these comments are exhausting. Hardware is messy. IP licensing for sensors and radios is a nightmare. Getting a functional OS out with "only" a few binary blobs is a massive engineering and legal victory. I'd rather have a working, 95% open ecosystem that I can actually hack on, than a 100% pure theoretical one that never ships…
As one of those commenters: It's actually super easy. It's fine for your product to only be mostly open source. It's definitely completely understandable if you can't open up some of the blobs that you yourself licensed. All I ask is that if you can't actually ship 100% of the software on the device needed to actually provide the advertised features, that you don't make a big headline claiming that it's 100% open sou…
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Well the Pebble specific parts are. This is an unfortunate state of affairs from hardware manufacturers, they are very late to the open source game, if at all.
Between the cross-licensing of hardware IP blocks and 3rd party software which never sees the light of the day, hardware manufacturers work like a secretive three letter agency to be able to control every part of their ecosystem. I tend to understand where this comes from. It's part business, part continuation of old customs and the way they did it and being able to control obsolescence to be able push new things to…