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Google open-sources the Pebble OS

opensource.googleblog.com

1–10 of 216 posts

Re: Google open-sources the Pebble OS

#3
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.

Re: Google open-sources the Pebble OS

#6
They've open sourced what they can, but these third party bits had to be stripped out:

- 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

Re: Google open-sources the Pebble OS

#8
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.

Props to Google on this.

Re: Google open-sources the Pebble OS

#10

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.
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