https://github.com/google/pebble
The future of Rebble
rebble.io
The future of Rebble
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: The future of Rebble
#2Well 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 threads are:
We're bringing Pebble back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091
Google open-sources the Pebble OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070
The future of Rebble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 (<-- you are here)
Re: The future of Rebble
#3Well 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…
DANG SAVE US hahaha
Re: The future of Rebble
#4I'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.
Re: The future of Rebble
#5Some 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, then killed two years later after a battery related recall issue.
It was, in my opinion, by far the best fitness tracker watch ever, and remains so to this day. Not so much because of it's actual features (which were relatively standard), but the software paradigm of simple yet effective exercise gamification that helped encourage exercise habit formation. 8 years later and I still miss it.
Re: The future of Rebble
#6I'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.
What did it look like? All the ones I've seen have been pretty ugly - plastic cases, etc.
Re: The future of Rebble
#7I'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.
Re: The future of Rebble
#8Well 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…
Let them them revvel in this glory IMO :), it's rare to see this kind of thing happen in the hardware space.
Re: The future of Rebble
#9Some 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.
Re: The future of Rebble
#10I'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?