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. Kudos to Eric for navigating the legal minefield to make this happen.
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 source.
For the sake of easy reference, I'll leave the relevant snippet from the linked article so people can decide for themselves with a bit more information:
> 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. This will always be the case. More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future. The core Pebble watch software stack (everything you need to use your Pebble watch) will always be open source.
if the blobs were built into firmware, so didn't need to be shipped, would you then say its a 100% open source software device? I'm not sure there's a huge difference.
The closest we got to a fully open source android release was probably in the Nexus one days with some 9 proprietary blobs and , worse, user space support programs (IIRC the compass calibration routines, annoyingly.) , all for various chip/radio support.
Honestly this feels like the best possible outcome. It's pretty unusual for an appstore implementation to support multiple feeds[0], but it's great resilience to large company failures when they do. This way, users can totally still access Rebble's feed (and pay for a subscription if they like) just as before, but they are free to also use something else.
It is the *end user* who decides which feeds to trust, as it should be. And since it's built right into the app as a core concept, it doesn't take massive engineering effort to switch feeds if some sort of drama occurs.
[0] I'd normally call these repositories, but I've used Eric's term for consistency with the article.
Definitely agree that this is the best outcome for everyone! In particular, with multiple repo support, I'm hoping this can open the door for some kind of "F-Droid for Pebble" with automated builds from source repos. So many Pebble apps are open source anyway I think it would be a good fit.
I had heard of many smaller apps using Kotlin for their iOS app, but this may be the biggest all in multiplatform app I've seen. It would be awesome if there may eventually be support for writing Pebble apps in Kotlin.
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++
Calling rust traditional is a bit of a stretch, while it is being done it's pretty much bleeding edge (though if you do not use any of the manufacturer supplied code and libraries to begin with you should be fine).
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.
I find this a little funny because as a firmware engineer the project I regularly work on only has 512kb of flash. This doesn't stop sales from constent new feature requests.
Embedded is definitely a fun balance of what we could do and how much we can do.
This doesn't make sense from Pebble hardware point of view.
Now it would be great if we could move on to C++, Zig or Rust, instead of coding C like I did in the MS-DOS days, where I was already able to develop C++ applications within 640 KB limitations.
Almost every tech company wants to continue the IBM "surrounded by blue" strategy, fencing customers into their "walled garden" surrounded by a Warren Buffet moat and blocking obsessively any competitor that wants to breach in. Google mandates that every Android application must be signed by developers verified by them, Microsoft demands that users open an account with them, ... and just don't get me started with AWS, Apple, John Deere, Nespresso, etc. Meanwhile, I fail to see any real contender in the smartphone arena.
But, in wearables, Pebble puts up a fight. The platform/product has proven resilient, mostly because of its users passion and commitment. It is more alive today than Fitbit, the company that bought and buried it.
And will only get stronger.
Now I'll be anxiously waiting for my PT2. It will be the 5th Pebble in my collection.
Wearing my new white pebble right now and am very happy with how open source the comeback has been. Incredibly happy with it and if you want a geeky, simple watch I really can't recommend it enough. The battery life and always on screen alone (especially at this price point) is reason enough.
Cheers to Eric for bringing back pebble in the way that he has !
For some of us software freedom enthusiasts it is worth noting that PebbleOS contains some proprietary blobs for some peripherals in the watch[1]. This is not just firmware you upload to the peripheral but also properietary .a libraries that run on the main core.
Though to be fair to OpenDevices, this is source code they don't have acces to either.
I don't really know that this is avoidable without buckets of work and probably legal issues on behalf of core's (or anyone's) engineers- it's really just something that plagues hardware in general.
Hell, lots of sensors/etc these days are running fairly complicated software that's totally opaque.
Do you demand circuit schematics? Hardware description language source code for all the ICs? Does it matter if it’s a FPGA vs a custom IC? What about CAD files for the industrial design - some of that is ‘functional’ (camera lenses and antennas being obvious examples).
If you don’t require hardware description language source or circuit schematics, does your position change if it’s a microcontroller with firmware? The functionality could be outwardly identical to a fully ‘hardware’ IC or FPGA, down to pinout and timing (see, for example, the many projects ‘cloning’ obsolete and unavailable custom ICs with microcontrollers in the retrocomputing field).
The simple statement that it's not 100% open source is not an attack on the effort. It needs to be said, because the blog entry's title is "Pebble Watch Software Is Now 100% Open Source".
Incidentally, this is one reason why there's not so much open source hardware out there: people get pedantic about it and apply gradually more unreasonable levels of requirement, rather than accepting partially or substantially open source solutions.
I can be pedantically forgiving myself, admittedly, but this is one thing I'm staunchly behind. If I cannot read every character of every line of code, including packages/dependencies, that makes the hardware function and allows me to alter it as I see fit, then it is not truly open-sourced.
For me, the open-source movement is about keeping my software and hardware in alignment with my values and security concerns. If there is a part of that "open-sourced" software that is closed to me, I have no way to evaluate that and determine if I want to use it. Yes, this imposes some extremely strict limitations about what I end up with in my projects, but I'm okay with this since it forces me to think differently about certain problems.
I also don't mind that other people use product with closed-source portions or whatever, and in fact, find some of them quite good. I'm a wearer of an original Pebble to this day, and I'm fine with knowing some proprietary libraries are needed to make it go. I didn't build it, I'm not hacking on it, it's just serving my meager smartwatch needs in this instance.
What I do mind is misappropriation of what I consider a clearly defined term. I am not sure why we haven't come up with another term to mean "partially open-sourced" yet (or have we, and I am just not aware of it?) but I think it's time we did so more discerning users can delineate between the two when making a decision about products to purchase or build.
> These non-free software components are not required - you can compile and run Pebble watch software without them. This will always be the case.
This seems like a reasonable balance. They're shipping default distributions with these blobs included, but you can remove them and run the literally completely purely open source version directly instead if you prefer (although it sounds like you'd notably lose heart rate tracking, along with speech recognition & similar).
The reason why people get "pedantic" about this stuff, is due the ability in the future to get screwed over when the priority blob owner start to charge money or other pull other license crap
1. It's the other way around: because people don't care that much, that's why there is almost exclusively proprietary hardware around.
2. The people who require the "higher grades" of being open source are simply not a large enough market
3. Being open source is not a natural advantage of a product, in fact, it's more of a risk, liability, responsibility, and effort than being proprietary.
Read Reflections on Trusting Trust to understand why having little bits of binary blobs sprinkled all over your compute arch is actually a major problem. Just because it’s a hard problem doesn’t mean we’re gonna pretend it’s fine.
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.
FOSS enthusiasts are the worst customers imaginable. Not only are they pedantic to the absurd levels you mention, they are also political extremists and will start a witch hunt unless you and your entire company does exactly as they say in every matter imaginable.
And worst of all: They are incredibly cheap and don't want to spend any of their money on high quality products or services. Scream at every dollar they have to spend. "I'm better off with this hand-me-down computer that my sister gave me when her office job upgraded machines".
Trying to please FOSS people is like opening a five star budget restaurant for people with complicated allergies. You're going to deal with the worst of humanity and go broke in the process.
Given how easy is to put and keep hidden malware into devices, governments should demand openness in that field as well. By "putting malware" I don't mean script kiddies in their moms basement but malware/spyware planted by design, which is extremely easy to do if you're the manufacturer, extremely easy to demand/force if you're the government above that manufacturer, and extremely hard to detect if you're a different user in a different country under a government that didn't demand full openness. I know it's impossible as business rules go, but ideally it shouldn't be.
The thing is governments are the people doing it, and most governments want to be able to put backdoors in more badly than they want other governments to not put backdoors in.
Open silicon is a big leap beyond open hardware schematics and BOMs that allow people to repair boards, or redesign them to use alternative components.
Precursor is the most open personal computing device that can be built currently.
The comment I replied to was about being "fully open". That indeed goes beyond open hardware. Precursor could go further by at least using an FPGA that has great open source tooling support. It's also not impossible to fab an open FPGA but that's also another hard(and expensive) step.
Precursor goes far, but definitely not as far as currently possible.
> Above a certain complexity, there is basically no 100% open-source hardware out there.
>
> Like none of the Pinephone, Librem, Framework laptops are "open-source" to the bone.
As an aside, GNU Librephone aims to rectify that by reverse-engineering those blobs and develop their own firmware for baseband chips etc. But I am carefully optimistic about the success since it is a relatively new project and quite a moonshot, even though I would personally stand first in line to buy one if it would materialize.
The framework laptop , any hard drive ( meaning the hard drives , internal system software ) would not be open source.
the embedded software in a SSD , possibly, but the chips could have backdoors etc
Human speech is not mathematical formalism. What would even "open-source" mean in case of hardware, is there a consensus on it to begin with? Is it only 'every firmware is open-source and available', or would you want the whole floorplan of the chip?
So given that the word doesn't really apply to hardware, I believe they used it correctly (100% means the set of things where it makes sense to be used) and are not misleading. In fact I strongly dislike some of the "open-hardware" marketing of some previously mentioned devices, when that is obviously false and misleading.
I don't know, depends on a lot of stuff. If you are interested in this property from a security perspective, then no -- it's trivial to have hardware backdoors without any binary blobs.
This likely would also mean that it can't be flashed, so if you care about future maintainability, this is also a negative -- it can not be updated/fixed in the future, which may or may not make sense depending on what part we are talking about.
But if there are some kind of signature validation then it gets even more complicated (like e.g. iphone screens knowing if they are from apple or not).
> I don't know, depends on a lot of stuff. If you are interested in this property from a security perspective, then no -- it's trivial to have hardware backdoors without any binary blobs.
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 the market.
However, if the periphery of the software you put out is closed source, even though this periphery is optional, it's not fair or ethical to say it's 100% open source.
From my perspective, it can be said it's open core, and it's pretty fair, and acceptable in my case, but writing 100% Open Source* (*: 100% of the open part of the software stack, exceptions apply) is not fair game. It's misleading.
Seems a bunch are angry about this, honestly, 100% of what they made/control is open source was a good enough bar for me. Specially if all closed components are optional. I value the flexibility of being able to use or not even closed stuff. It's unclear to me what the issue is, false advertisement ? This is as good as it gets for things like this, maybe the "100%" was indelicate, but I wouldn't go so far as misleading. I can also understand the hardware companies, history has shown that the vast majority of industry actors have a purely parasitical relation to open source, and have no qualms copying/stealing IP.
Personally, I'm not angry. On the contrary, I'm pretty neutral about closed-source, optional add-ons. I started playing/working with computers pretty early, and the current state is an utopia when compared to olden times in terms of Free and Open Source software (OTOH, both Free Software and Open Source is under heavy attack because of many reasons I won't enter here).
What bothers me is "100%" part of the open source claim. I personally like the Debian model a lot. It's DFSG compliant by default, and if non-free software is needed, it's attainable. Debian is "as Free as you want, as closed as you need".
I see, new Pebble follows the same model, and it's perfectly fine, but branding it as 100% Open Source is not.
I'll not discuss hardware companies. It's a can of worms that doesn't belong to that reply. Let's say while I understand some of their reservations, these reservation doesn't change that they're greedy and selfish (beyond acceptable limits).
Hardware isn't that hard to copy paste really, to make it hard you need to use really expensive processes (extreme uv etc), but otherwise, mostly you can pretty much take a picture. (very grossly speaking here, but just saying, the software is definitely a critical part)
>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. This will always be the case. More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future. The core Pebble watch software stack (everything you need to use your Pebble watch) will always be open source.
Debian doesn't advertise itself as 100% open source, either.
Main and Contrib has to obey DFSG guidelines, and there's an optional non-free repository which you can enable if you prefer.
Firmware is a gnarly can of worms though, and while I prefer 100% free firmware myself, companies are not brave enough to open that part of their ecosystem, yet, if ever.
Companies typically move more and more functionality to closed firmware, so they can ”open source” a thin wrapper, like a driver, that is often completely useless, and often encumbered with cryptography restrictions, strict trademarks and software patents anyway.
NVIDIA does exactly what you said. Move everything to firmware and closed GL libraries, and open source a kernel module to facilitate communication. They even created different firmware versions to prevent open source drivers to use the whole card.
AMD did the inverse: They re-implemented a fully open driver from scratch, opened up the specs, made every part which they can make (legally) accessible, accessible, open sourced ROCm and send in packages to major distributions' (main / open source) repositories. Their firmware is closed source, but it's obtainable and doesn't require signatures to enable the card. They even clashed with HDMI forums to make a libre implementation of v2.1, but the forum basically threatened them.
Intel's graphics drivers are basically the same with AMD.
Broadcom / Intel / Realtek NICs work without their respective firmware blobs, yet their offloading capabilities are disabled. Either way, the drivers are completely open source and in the kernel mainline.
Same for most sound cards sans Creative Labs. I want to hit them with a foam cluebat so bad.
Logitech's all stuff works with open drivers. They are the primary contributor to V4L standard, standardize their webcam interfaces and provide drivers or help.
> More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future.
That sounds ominous.
I can understand not being able to remove non-free dependencies that were used previously, but that sounds like they intend to create new non-free components.
Closed verilog I can accept. But in general firmware is also software, for example it has become quite popular in the recent years to execute firmware on an embedded riscv cpu. And move more and more functionality to that kind of firmware.
I'm sure its happened before, but this is the first time i finally get to see some sort of modern hardware in KiCad.
Pretty cool to see all 6 layers, paste layers, and adhesive layers as well.
I've always wondered how the cake was made and if big projects do/could use KiCad.
Seems like a lot more work relative to those Single Layer PCBs on YouTube for things like emulators and custom PCBs. Glad I now know for sure, that I can't do this.
Paste and adhesive are spat out by KiCad as part of the manufacturing outputs. It works pretty much the same way other EDA packages like altium do - the extra layers are part of the part footprint. If you don’t design your own footprints it’s basically no extra work to generate those.
You almost certainly could do it - obviously with some time investment. Getting multi layer PCBs made is surprisingly affordable now.
Depends on any project ideas, but as a newbie to hardware dev and with my own small scope eurorack module idea, I am having a lot of luck with flux.ai. Even got a small order of 5 PCBs printed for under $200.
It's great to see the app open-sourced! Hopefully this can be distributed on F-Droid one day soon!
And the ability to choose app repos is also a wonderful development. Nothing against Rebble at all, but more choices and more openness is always better!
This is awesome. What a way to do a relaunch. I was a Pebble user in 2013 on first release and saddened when it all broke down. I was so turned off from that experience that I swore off smart watches (I wear a Casio now).
This could get me back, though I’ll admit the appeal has gone down since I’ve realized how nice it is to create separation between me and my notifications.
Doesn't address the multiple feed support for the app store, and seems to be calling Eric to action a few times, but it would be too much of a coincidence that these two posts come out so close to one another.
Thank you for posting this, it really gave me an answer to the "huh, how did all that drama from last week play out." IMO rebble jumped to some conclusions and felt robbed/cheated by what Eric was doing. With Eric going above and beyond to open source everything, I really feel he is trying to live up to what the original promise of pebble was. It is cool what rebble did to keep the pebble community alive, and I get that they might feel slighted, but if you take all egos out of the equation, what Eric is doing is like the best possible outcome - we get new pebble devices. Isn't that 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 in the middle, and while this does appear to be more of miscommunication than malice, it's a bit disappointing to me overall.
I see it as the melodramatic theater that goes hand in hand with the development of tech we love. Linux lore is by all measures filled with these types of moments, and as time goes on there are moments of peace and moments of chaos. With any luck the end users live to see another day of tech or software they enjoy. It’s part of our story as humans.
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
through all of this, it really feels like rebble didn't know what they want (as they say). the future collaboration with eric also sounds like they don't know what they want. they want a third party mediator for... something. Eric was already prepared to pay them per user, which seemed generous to me to begin with.
It sounds to me like Rebble (the board + community) should figure out what they want before trying to proceed, lest they further waste time and good-faith negotiating capital. like are they unhappy with the previous payment rate per user? or something else?
To me it speaks to the fact that Rebble is not really an organization that is in a position to actually negotiate a long term deal with another company and go through all the trials and tribulations that involves.
That is not a criticism of them nor is it surprising, their responsibility up to now has been to maintain a core set of open source software. A loosely structured control structure is entirely appropriate for that task. But it really does not work when instead of bringing one person representing the company to a negotiation, you have half a dozen people who all have their own thoughts and levels of interest and commitment, some of whom will resort to community action if they don't like something about the process.
It seems like Rebble (the board) really overplayed their hand.
From what they posted, it seems like they wanted more control over what Core was doing, deciding that the best way to do that was to try and hold the app store data hostage.
Now, with the Core app open sourced and multiple app store repos supported, Rebble's position will likely be greatly diminished from what it could have been if they had been satisfied with what they had. I guess in the end though, the outcome was a net win for everyone (fully open source apps), so it works out.
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 more clearly than any other explanation I've found (or they've elucidated).
My best understanding (which I've extrapolated from what I've learned) is that they had all these plans of being a scrappy team who worked together on PebbleOS in their spare time, as friends, and Eric capitalising a company of paid developers has made all those plans redundant - so they've been powering through the five stages of grief in coming to terms with that while everyone else has been celebrating the return of Pebble.
They went from “Core Devices to stealing and everything is terrible and we are making demands” to “Actually everything was fine all along oopsy sorry for the misunderstandings”…
I'm excited that the back will screw off so we can replace the battery. I'm curious about waterproofing. Will that hold? Will we need to replace a gasket or other parts, in addition to the battery?
The watch is only listed as water resistant, not waterproof. I don't know if he's said anything specific about the Time 2, but for the 2 Duo (same target water resistance rating) he's written about the water resistance here: https://ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-2-duo-is-in-mass-production . He says you shouldn't take the watch swimming, shouldn't expose it to hot water like a shower (weakens the glue and eliminates the water resistance), and shouldn't expose it to high pressure water. They seem designed mainly to protect against incidental splashes rather than any serious water exposure.
True but he does say "it is waterproofed" [1] and this is the common way of referring to this level of water resistance (IPX8, 1 meter for 30 mins). I wouldn't take it in a hot shower, but IPX8 should be good for more than being "water resistant" to incidental splashes.
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 Time 2 (the watch I bought to replace my Fossil HR Collider which replaced my orig. Pebble 2) is user serviceable. I had to open my Pebble 2 because my buttons were falling off. I bought a second hand donor (Pebble OC, since I ditched my broken Pebble OC at some point) and unfortunately I failed to succeed the transplantation of the buttons. Which made me very sad.
I also very much liked you could turn the radios off on the Pebble 2. The HR was useless though. But if I want a good quality of that, I'd go for Garmin or (if I were in the Apple ecosystem) an Apple Watch.
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.
I think Pebble only recently worked again with iOS. I don't use iOS, I use AOSP-based OS. So for me, Apple Watch isn't an option, since it doesn't work well with that. Battery life and being able to replace the battery is also important to me.
They've made two big changes that are surely the result of the recent drama:
* The companion app is now completely open source, ensuring that the community can continue supporting the watches if Core goes under.
* You can subscribe to multiple app stores while optionally paying for services, and Core will maintain their own store. This seems to placate Rebble so they can do their thing and provide their paid services.
I plan on picking one of these new Pebbles up in the next batch. I loved my original Pebbles (I still have my old Time Steel). Before the Pebbles came back and PebbleOS open-sourced, the only real open smartwatch option we had around that I'm aware of is the PineTime, which I currently wear every day rocking Infinitime.
Will be fun to pick up one of these again and be able to hop back and forth between it and the PineTime! Great stuff, Eric and team.
I look forward to a year or two from now when there will be dozens of pebble clones just rolling out of factories for the price of a midrange Casio watch.
This along with valve's hardware announcement is quite a shot at all the entreched hardware manufacturers.
Love to see this! I personally find this incredibly exciting. There is a major death of hardware out there that is user-respecting and hacker-friendly, and it warms my heart immensely to see such committments. I'm buying two today (one for me and one for my wife)!
Don’t have much to add except huge congrats on relaunching. What a move, not only bringing it back from the dead, but also doing it in a way that many people dream that companies would. I just bought an Apple Watch, but this is really tempting.
When factories restart, not all of the workers who were working there before actually come back to work. Some of them stay in their hometowns or they get other jobs. This means that restarting the production line actually means retraining people on how to assemble the product. There is also an entire supply chain behind the assembly line that takes time to restart. Think of all the sub-components like plastics, metal components, etc. that need to be built at respective factories. It takes time to ship them to the primary factory for final assembly and test.
After the product gets assembled, there are several stages of testing, like gluing, environmental testing, final assembly test, and packaging, that take time as well. Then the product has to be shipped to the fulfillment center, packaged, labeled, and then shipped out. Each step time, and the process needs to completely re-start after CNY.
Thanks for explaining this. Would you estimate that the January units will be more likely to have issues than the later ones, since they'll be first off the line? Or will there be no changes to the components/process that might make the later units more reliable?
A good manufacturing process (with the appropriate level of testing) should result in yield variations, not quality variations. i.e. if the line is running less well for some reason, then you end up throwing more in the bin rather than shipping bad product.
Sorry to hijack, but are there plans to re-manufacture the Pebble 2 Duo in black?
I was one of the pre-orderers that was offered either a refund or a white version and chose the refund because I really had my heart set on the black and don't want a color screen.
I'm also an OG Pebble enthusiast, although sadly my old one is long gone.
Eric has made it clear that the Pebble 2 Duo was always going to be a limited run because it was made mostly of leftover components and there's no reasonable path towards making new copies of those components.
> Pebble 2 Duo is sold out! We are not making more.
It really is, I wish there were a version of the Time 2 that had a BW screen. I did manage to snag one of the Pebble 2 Duos before they sold out and I love it. The contrast and reflectivity is unbeatable.
Out of curiosity, what's the downside of color? The screen on the new watches is also substantially larger. AFAIK there's no discernible battery life penalty for the color watches (even with the larger screen).
I may be wrong, but I think they mean ship from the factory to the distribution point so that could add some time between an item being made and shipped to a customer
But I've never done anything like this, so ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
This is great news! I know the new Pebble has a small team and is focused on being a long term sustainable enterprise. This should help with that goal quite a bit.
I received my Pebble 2 Duo about a month ago, and it is awesome. Nice job and thank you! I feel 10 years younger :)
I see a future where FOSS designs for consumer products compete with commercial releases.
It will take far more sophisticated micro-manufacturing (like 3d-printing but different tools handling more types of materials).
Get the jacket in your exact size with the best materials. Benefit from having incrementally improved from the original (for example under arm vent zipper angle improved). All of it unbranded or custom branded.
Seems hard to believe annual released, mass manufacturing will compete.
My experience is that consumer products, for example winter jackets, have gone down in quality and way, way up in price.
The designs themselves are often just bad. It is almost like consumers are punished for not spending enough with bad color options. (You can see this in running shoes as well)
Even if the right aesthetic and function is found, there's no real consideration of body type or shape, you get a few sizes to choose from.
I think big brands have consumers over a barrel today. When the design and materials assembly are solved, I think people will pay more to get the thing they want. And I think they're more likely to keep them longer as a result.
Is it me or is the "Rivian blue" that he refers to in the video not that close to the color of actual Rivians? IMO the watch band/insert color is less green and quite a bit lighter. Not bad, per se, but I feel like this is not the best descriptor since it might make people think it's a different color.
Material color is very tough, especially comparing metallic paint to polycarbonate. Lighting matters, reflections matter. We tried our best, but yes, obviously it's not exactly the same.
I don't know if using them would wreck the economics of the matter, but this is exactly why Pantone exists. Perhaps Rivian uses them, and someone there might be willing to share with you the exact Pantone code.
And of course, video adds another layer of complexity. Would you say that the video looks accurate to you, or does calling it "Rivian blue" help people understand what it looks like in real life?
I don't actually own a Rivian. I've seen them from afar. They look cool. I have not held a Pebble Time up to a Rivian yet. Maybe I'll creepily do that in downtown Palo Alto today :)
As someone who has been working on a pair of smart glasses running RTOS, and having to make companion apps for both iOS and Android, I am very interested in reading your approaches to a lot of the same problems I have faced. There's not a lot of information out there on these topics.
In terms of long-term market viability, have you considered whether your success could encourage Apple or other large competitors to make a battery life-optimized version of their smartwatches?
I understand that some Pebble fans are all about the customization, and will be with you forever. But probably many people care mostly about the battery life, which is severely lacking in watches from Apple, Google, etc.
If Apple realized there was a big enough market to justify making a $200 Apple Watch Basic, how much could that undercut your business?
Relatedly, when will we learn more about the other "core" devices that you're contemplating, and which you alluded to in the video? Building more of a unique ecosystem could help with the moat.
> In terms of long-term market viability, have you considered whether your success could encourage Apple or other large competitors to make a battery life-optimized version of their smartwatches?
Companies like Garmin, Coros and Suunto already make less-smart-watches with weeks of battery life, and those haven't convinced Apple to budge from only making watches that do everything under the sun but barely last a day. Another long-lasting watch from a tiny brand probably isn't going to move the needle.
IDK about Coros or Suunto, but the only Garmins with a battery life approaching 30 days cost ~$1,000. This could be competition for AWU, but wouldn't communicate that there is demand for a more basic/long-lasting Apple Watch.
The baseline for watches is changing the battery every 3-5 YEARS! This modernity of charging watches daily is a pox on humanity brought on by Apple.
Pebble (and Fitbit, and others) were always in the "week-plus" timeframe for charging. Meeting the "minimum bar" of 14-17 days battery life (of the OG pebbles) is successful. Shooting for "30 days" is definitively best-in-class performance for smart-watches!
> I don't see why you are defining success as 30 days of battery life when the baseline is charging your watch every day.
Up until about 10 years ago, no one would have considered the baseline to be charging your watch every day. Even today, most watches/wrist-worn step counters don't require daily charging.
I wouldn't define 30 days as success, but I do want to start out at 2+ weeks. Battery life gets worse over time, and watches aren't meant to last for just a little while. I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on something that will require charging more than once a week within a year or two.
Appreciate the links, but I'm guessing these are estimates with AOD disabled? That's another benefit of the Pebble (AOD doesn't reduce battery life).
30 days is asking a lot of any reasonably sized smartwatch, but if you set your sights a bit lower then a $250 Coros Pace 4 will do ~3 weeks with AOD off, ~1 week with AOD on, and 30-40 hours of continuous GPS recording. That's still a lot longer than any Apple Watch even if it's not hitting the 30 day milestone.
My Coros Pace 2 was my solution to my desire for a less smart watch. It cost $200 when I got it 3 years ago. I run a ton and the exercise features of the Pebble just didn’t do it for me (and I don’t want to keep swapping watches based on what I’m doing). I easily get 2+ weeks with 7-8 exercises with GPS on. The screen is some variation of those transflective LCDs or MIPs LCDs.
I can never go back to a 2 day battery life for a watch, even if my 5 year old iPhone technically can’t make it through half a day of use….
Yeah, I’m not sure if I like that choice from them. I really like the look of their non OLED displays. This has been my favorite running watch, and I’ve used it the longest out of all the different watches I’ve had. Although if I want them to keep existing as a company I should consider buying another.
Yeah I don't need 30 days, but starting out at a week with AOD puts a pretty low ceiling on future battery life. Appreciate the pointer though.
In thinking further, I realized that the buttons are actually a pretty good moat against the big tech company competitors. Their UIs are all about touchscreens, so they'll never have as many/useful buttons as Pebbles do.
Didn't realize Garmin made monochrome solar watches. It is much cheaper. However, looks like an absolute tank, which would not fit under many shirtsleeves...
Apart from all the awesome annoucements, what really makes me happy is how quickly this went from internet drama to both parties moving towards doing whats best for the community.
Props to Core and Rebble for making Pebble what it is today and casting a bright future for theses watches. Been happily wearing my Pebble Steel for the past month after replacing its battery, looking forward to the PT2!
Ew open you say? Micropython-watch is actually useful, you can program it do things while on the run. Did not make it perse, but I added webrepl-button to it.
I'm very not in the smart watch game but a fully open watch with a bunch of sensors and connectivity sounds very appealing. However, I find square watch faces to be extremely unattractive. What's the latest in open watches with round faces and relatively thin profile?
Eric has hinted at wanting to build a round Pebble (like the Pebble Time Round, presumably), so hopefully things will go well with the initial batches and we'll be graced with the presence of a PTR in time for Christmas 2026.
if taking on a brand name might incur lawsuits there are other watches like the wahoo rival which was completely retired and they got out of the business (it was only $99 too)
or there are other ppen hardware options from China
There is, but I would set expectations lower than Apple's "taptic engine" where they designed their own hardware with a team of engineers and a bazillion dollars.
One of the recent development updates mentioned adding a global "vibrate on hour" setting which historically had to be implemented as an option by the specific watchface you're using.
I’ll be comparing to a Timex Expedition Grid Shock, which I’ve been using for years. Have no idea why they discontinued it. Suspect it had something to do with clueless leadership who undervalue customer satisfaction.
My current smartwatch is $7 I got from the thrift store. Not only does it offer everything an Apple Watch offers, but it also measures blood pressure (surprisingly accurate) and has a small flashlight, and I charge it once every 3 weeks. The only issue is its app is limited and you can’t customize anything besides the watch faces and the wrist strap. So having that, it’s really hard to compete if you are just going to offer another smartwatch, which is a great strategy to open source the software and allow customization, even on the hardware level to some degree. Myself and a lot of people would be interested to have that!
I honestly don’t even know the model, as the Bluetooth pairing name is just some number, the app (iOS) is called “Da fit” if that will help you. I was thinking before about tearing it down but it’s waterproof and I know this process will ruin it and won’t be able to use it while swimming or similar.
If the health monitoring is reliable, im sold. I want to move on from apples clutches despite the pebble hardware not looking particularly attractive to me
> Yesterday, Pebble watch software was ~95% open source. Today, it’s 100% open source. You can download, compile and run all the software you need to use your Pebble. We just published the source code for the new Pebble mobile app!
Except...
> 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. This will always be the case. More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future. The core Pebble watch software stack (everything you need to use your Pebble watch) will always be open source.
So 100% FOSS, except for the parts that are closed source now, and any that they add later.
The important thing is that all the code written by Core Devices is open source. They can't force third parties to open their code, but they're opening all of their own work. And that proprietary code is not required to use the watches. Most of them don't even have heart rate sensors, and clearly Memfault is not required. They're committing to maintaining a 100% open source version that still allows you to use the watches with minimal compromise.
Then say "Pebble Watch Software written by Core Devices Is Now 100% Open Source", or "Pebble mobile app open sourced" (that seems to be the major actual change?), or something like that. The thing they've actually done should be commended, but that doesn't mean ignoring that they've chosen to make a claim in the headline that isn't actually true.
Part of this is driven by necessity, for example, cellular network chips are typically binary blobs, etc. as mentioned, the heart rate sensor is a binary blob and that's likely because there are no good OSS solutions for those components.
A lot of battery firmwares are closed source, the way that they fixed this for the early pinephone was literally just staring at a memory listing and aiming a heat gun at the battery to see how it reacted when it went hot.
Sure; I'm aware that embedded sucks. And to be clear, this is (IMHO) tolerable so long as the blobs are redistributable. But then maybe don't headline with "100% open source". It's better to be honest about it.
I see your point, but it feels more like the difference between 99% fat free and 100% fat free. Technically measurable, but irrelevant in practice when the alternatives are all basically closed source.
To some people, it's more like "99% shellfish free." I personally don't mind that the cellular radio is closed-source, but I'm also not allergic to shellfish.
> I see your point, but it feels more like the difference between 99% fat free and 100% fat free.
Then why not have the headline say "99% open source"? IMO, either it doesn't matter and you can just say that it's almost all FOSS, or it does matter and you really shouldn't be lying about it.
> Technically measurable, but irrelevant in practice when the alternatives are all basically closed source.
The alternatives are the pinetime, watchy, and bangle.js, which AFAIK are also ~95% FOSS. I guess Apple and Google also offer smart watches, but I'd argue that those are so different in terms of features that they're not really direct competitors.
Yeah, it's weird because they're the ones writing that headline, and the claim is that it's 100% open source. They didn't have to word it that way, they chose to.
That's a different thing. They're also doing at least some degree of open hardware:
> We’ve also published electrical and mechanical design files for Pebble 2 Duo. Yes, you can download the schematic (includes KiCad project files) right now on Github! This should give you a nice jumpstart to designing your own PebbleOS-compatible device.
But this is about the software/firmware running on it.
I'm not sure if you're splitting hairs or not. I definitely thought this post would be about them finding open source alternatives to binary firmware, but if it doesn't interoperate with optional non-free software then it is not Open Source.
It seems to be comparable to debian, and that's as open source as it gets.
Yeah, it's a perfectly fine place to land. My objection is completely to claiming to be 100% open source when it isn't; if they'd just said 99% open source, or that everything they'd written was now open, then I wouldn't mind (or at least, I'd view it as unfortunate, but I wouldn't be upset with them).
"Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Core Devices and to recipients of software distributed by Core Devices a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works."
A few years from now we will see the usual HN thread were contributors lachrymosely complain about how their precious work was stolen by a good-turned-evil organization.
Please note our CLA explicitly include a clause to require Core Devices to distribute all contributions under an OSI-compatible FOSS license (e.g. GPLv3). So no contributions can be 'stolen'.
But OSI-compatible FOSS licenses include pushover ones like MIT, so even though you couldn't steal all of the contributions to make a proprietary fork, any other company then could.
but in the rest of the ecosystem a bunch of the inherited code is already Apache or MIT. so, i presume you have already forked the other repos to relicense them. can you drop a link?
I'm the first to agree that contributions can't be stolen in this scenario but read the threads I'm referring to. People feel that way anyway if you stop supporting a component or distribute your focus between a free and a paid tier.
What we need is more awareness that looking at the license alone is not enough to make an informed decision if contributing to a project is aligned with the contributors attitude and personal goals.
With that in mind: Thank you for putting the CLA right in the repo where it belongs and people can easily find it. Many organizations put a license upfront and bury the CLA. For a particularly bad example try MonoDB.
"The Medieval Latin practice of writing -ch- for -c- before Latin -r- also altered anchor, pulchritude, sepulchre. The -y- is pedantic, from the former belief that the word was pure Greek."
not exactly, fitbit acquired pebble in 2016, and google acquired fitbit in 2021. so while google did end up with the IP in the end, they did the Right Thing this year and open-sourced PebbleOS.
i don't normally praise google, but i am glad their open-sourcing of pebbleOS here enabled this new revival of Pebble devices.
Also includes news about a new Appstore, which can probably be seen as a reaction to the stories from last week:
We’ve created our own Pebble Appstore feed (appstore-api.repebble.com) and new Developer Dashboard. Our feed (fyi powered by 100% new software) is configured to back up an archive of all apps and faces to Archive.org (backup will gradually complete over the next week). Today, our feed only has a subset of all Pebble watchfaces and apps (thank you aveao for creating Pebble Archive!). Developers - you can upload your existing or new apps right now! We hope that this sets a standard for openness and we encourage all feeds to publish a freely and publicly available archive.
I read the drama last week, and after seeing this, I have to side with Rebble. I think they kept the community alive since Eric M cashed out and Fitbit shut it down. As the stars have aligned in recent years, Eric revives Pebble, but if Rebble wouldn't spend all the effort maintaining the app store, his consumer base would be much smaller and it would be much harder to bootstrap again.
With Repebble (Core Devices) and their new appstore (or/and apt-style repository system), Rebble seems obsolete, it's a bit sad. They deserve credit which they won't be able to claim anymore. They should be rewarded somehow for bridging the dark age, otherwise it seems they served purpose all until Eric returned and said "Thank You and fuck off".
Also, to me, Eric talking doesn't sound authentic, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's lying. I don't mean to insult though, mad respect for putting project like Pebble together.
Hope that there's some place and purpose for Rebble in the future.
I'm surprised by this comment; after the drama last week and after seeing this I fully have to side against Rebble.
The nature of driving a healthy open source centered ecosystem is that you don't control it under your iron fist: you make good contributions, users _and_ companies are able to use them in all new ways which comply with the licensing terms. And it seems that RePebble is going way beyond the licensing terms requirements, but bending over backwards to honor Rebble here when they aren't actually required to.
I just can't imagine what people want from RePebble if not this: they are being maximally open, making it so all of everything would be able to continue if they went out of business tomorrow, while also actively enabling people to continue using Rebble's store and paid offerings. Should they be forcing users to use Rebble's offerings (instead of making things even more open) as a reward for doing a good job bridging the dark age?
My impression is that there is a lot more going on than just the facts provided by both sides. Core technologies managed to get Katie Berry to step away from the project[1] and that's extremely significant to me. Her tireless dedication to keeping Pebble alive (and get it open sourced) is how any of this is possible. For her to just up and leave now tells me that Eric and Core are not being as magnanimous and friendly to community as these blogs posts and actions might suggest.
Both of those comments seem to just boil down to "Core probably could be more proactive about comms", which hardly seems like a particularly egregious sin.
"interactions with Core have gone so poorly that they were adversely impacting my mental health"
That seems a little more serious than "could be proactive about comms" especially when this is one of the key people responsible for a lot of the original Pebble tech, rebble tech, and working within Google to get the Pebble OS open sourced.
I think unfortunately this is a normal thing that happens: passionate people get very attached to something and have trouble dealing with dispute even when everyone is relatively good intentioned. I've seen it in the workplace a dozen times.
They also backed down from their ludicrous position that they are acting as protectors of other people's watchfaces being downloaded in bulk by a particular company they don't like, whereas they are totally fine with the watchfaces being publicly available for general use. It clearly reads as them trying to clutch control of the one thing they haven't open sourced.
Rebble contributors did have a legitimate gripe, which is that they were lead to develop some additional software under the idea that there would be an agreement at the end of the day. But the Rebble Foundation's response to this was totally immature and irrational.
I agree with what Eric said in his follow up, which is that it is quite concerning to engage in a partnership with an organization which reacts like this as part of a negotiation process. God knows I wouldn't, and it doesn;t surprise me that an alternative solution was found.
Well said and exactly my thoughts on it as well. Eric has done more than he really had to, and it is unclear to me what rebble really wants/is positioning for.
You are not really factoring in all the work on the hardware, much of the software, and the entirety of the financing, which is being done by Eric and the Core Devices team.
If Rebble wants to take the risk and put out a smartwatch, there is nothing stopping them. Infact all of the open sourcing work Core Devices has done gives them a good starting point.
He gave them a deal that would directly send cash their way, which he didn't have to do at all. The vast majority of founders wouldn't have touched that with a 10 foot pole.
> They deserve credit which they won't be able to claim anymore.
Why won't they be able to claim credit for the work that they did the past because of other people's work in the present?
> Also, to me, Eric talking doesn't sound authentic, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's lying. I don't mean to insult though, mad respect for putting project like Pebble together.
What the heck are you trying to do here if not insult him? It seems wild to say he sounds inauthentic and you think he's potentially lying, and then try to hedge by saying that's not intended as an insult.
Apparently I misremembered the story, while Pebble was prototyped in Canada by U of Waterloo guys, when they went startup & kickstarter with the product they moved to California.
Ok Rumi. It's my opinion if you don't agree just say I don't agree. Im doing you a favor by giving you an alternative more truthful reality. If you prefer to be in bliss then that's fine but stop acting so sleazy.
We don't need a mini-sermon. We just need you, like everyone, to follow the guidelines. Criticism is fine. Emptiness and thoughtlessness is not. You're welcome not to participate here if you're unwilling to put a little effort and substance into what you post.
We did that, but the best way to show you want to contribute positively to HN is to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) rather than raising the issue only after you've been pulled up for abuse.
This title is misleading. As explained in the comments, there are still non-free binary blobs in the firmware. Please reserve phrasing like "100% X" for things that are indeed "0% Not(X)."
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. Kudos to Eric for navigating the legal minefield to make this happen.
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 source.
For the sake of easy reference, I'll leave the relevant snippet from the linked article so people can decide for themselves with a bit more information:
> 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. This will always be the case. More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future. The core Pebble watch software stack (everything you need to use your Pebble watch) will always be open source.
if the blobs were built into firmware, so didn't need to be shipped, would you then say its a 100% open source software device? I'm not sure there's a huge difference.
The closest we got to a fully open source android release was probably in the Nexus one days with some 9 proprietary blobs and , worse, user space support programs (IIRC the compass calibration routines, annoyingly.) , all for various chip/radio support.
And look how that ended up.
THIS is the post that finally got me to make a pre-order, as a former Pebble engineer.
FOSS all the things so my freedoms are never restricted again, and I am happy to pay.
Honestly this feels like the best possible outcome. It's pretty unusual for an appstore implementation to support multiple feeds[0], but it's great resilience to large company failures when they do. This way, users can totally still access Rebble's feed (and pay for a subscription if they like) just as before, but they are free to also use something else.
It is the *end user* who decides which feeds to trust, as it should be. And since it's built right into the app as a core concept, it doesn't take massive engineering effort to switch feeds if some sort of drama occurs.
[0] I'd normally call these repositories, but I've used Eric's term for consistency with the article.
Definitely agree that this is the best outcome for everyone! In particular, with multiple repo support, I'm hoping this can open the door for some kind of "F-Droid for Pebble" with automated builds from source repos. So many Pebble apps are open source anyway I think it would be a good fit.
A little surprised there has been no mention of the app being Kotlin multiplatform. https://github.com/coredevices/mobileapp
I had heard of many smaller apps using Kotlin for their iOS app, but this may be the biggest all in multiplatform app I've seen. It would be awesome if there may eventually be support for writing Pebble apps in Kotlin.
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++
Calling rust traditional is a bit of a stretch, while it is being done it's pretty much bleeding edge (though if you do not use any of the manufacturer supplied code and libraries to begin with you should be fine).
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.
I find this a little funny because as a firmware engineer the project I regularly work on only has 512kb of flash. This doesn't stop sales from constent new feature requests.
Embedded is definitely a fun balance of what we could do and how much we can do.
This doesn't make sense from Pebble hardware point of view.
Now it would be great if we could move on to C++, Zig or Rust, instead of coding C like I did in the MS-DOS days, where I was already able to develop C++ applications within 640 KB limitations.
Here's a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOQMDkCsCSw
From Eric’s blog post:
“Want to learn more about how we built the new app cross platform using Kotlin Multiplatform? Watch Steve’s presentation at Droidcon [1].”
1. https://youtu.be/UOQMDkCsCSw
As a Kotlin multiplatform developer myself, this is wonderful to see!
This is precious.
Almost every tech company wants to continue the IBM "surrounded by blue" strategy, fencing customers into their "walled garden" surrounded by a Warren Buffet moat and blocking obsessively any competitor that wants to breach in. Google mandates that every Android application must be signed by developers verified by them, Microsoft demands that users open an account with them, ... and just don't get me started with AWS, Apple, John Deere, Nespresso, etc. Meanwhile, I fail to see any real contender in the smartphone arena.
But, in wearables, Pebble puts up a fight. The platform/product has proven resilient, mostly because of its users passion and commitment. It is more alive today than Fitbit, the company that bought and buried it.
And will only get stronger.
Now I'll be anxiously waiting for my PT2. It will be the 5th Pebble in my collection.
Wearing my new white pebble right now and am very happy with how open source the comeback has been. Incredibly happy with it and if you want a geeky, simple watch I really can't recommend it enough. The battery life and always on screen alone (especially at this price point) is reason enough.
Cheers to Eric for bringing back pebble in the way that he has !
For some of us software freedom enthusiasts it is worth noting that PebbleOS contains some proprietary blobs for some peripherals in the watch[1]. This is not just firmware you upload to the peripheral but also properietary .a libraries that run on the main core.
Though to be fair to OpenDevices, this is source code they don't have acces to either.
[1]: https://github.com/coredevices/pebbleos-nonfree/tree/57a94e2...
I don't really know that this is avoidable without buckets of work and probably legal issues on behalf of core's (or anyone's) engineers- it's really just something that plagues hardware in general.
Hell, lots of sensors/etc these days are running fairly complicated software that's totally opaque.
Hardware and software are fungible.
Do you demand circuit schematics? Hardware description language source code for all the ICs? Does it matter if it’s a FPGA vs a custom IC? What about CAD files for the industrial design - some of that is ‘functional’ (camera lenses and antennas being obvious examples).
If you don’t require hardware description language source or circuit schematics, does your position change if it’s a microcontroller with firmware? The functionality could be outwardly identical to a fully ‘hardware’ IC or FPGA, down to pinout and timing (see, for example, the many projects ‘cloning’ obsolete and unavailable custom ICs with microcontrollers in the retrocomputing field).
By that reasoning the linux kernel is also not open source. Be reasonable.
And, for this reason, different entities ship different versions of the Linux kernel (and system) as well.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trisquel
The simple statement that it's not 100% open source is not an attack on the effort. It needs to be said, because the blog entry's title is "Pebble Watch Software Is Now 100% Open Source".
So not 100% open source. Thanks for the info
Incidentally, this is one reason why there's not so much open source hardware out there: people get pedantic about it and apply gradually more unreasonable levels of requirement, rather than accepting partially or substantially open source solutions.
I can be pedantically forgiving myself, admittedly, but this is one thing I'm staunchly behind. If I cannot read every character of every line of code, including packages/dependencies, that makes the hardware function and allows me to alter it as I see fit, then it is not truly open-sourced.
For me, the open-source movement is about keeping my software and hardware in alignment with my values and security concerns. If there is a part of that "open-sourced" software that is closed to me, I have no way to evaluate that and determine if I want to use it. Yes, this imposes some extremely strict limitations about what I end up with in my projects, but I'm okay with this since it forces me to think differently about certain problems.
I also don't mind that other people use product with closed-source portions or whatever, and in fact, find some of them quite good. I'm a wearer of an original Pebble to this day, and I'm fine with knowing some proprietary libraries are needed to make it go. I didn't build it, I'm not hacking on it, it's just serving my meager smartwatch needs in this instance.
What I do mind is misappropriation of what I consider a clearly defined term. I am not sure why we haven't come up with another term to mean "partially open-sourced" yet (or have we, and I am just not aware of it?) but I think it's time we did so more discerning users can delineate between the two when making a decision about products to purchase or build.
From the article:
> These non-free software components are not required - you can compile and run Pebble watch software without them. This will always be the case.
This seems like a reasonable balance. They're shipping default distributions with these blobs included, but you can remove them and run the literally completely purely open source version directly instead if you prefer (although it sounds like you'd notably lose heart rate tracking, along with speech recognition & similar).
The reason why people get "pedantic" about this stuff, is due the ability in the future to get screwed over when the priority blob owner start to charge money or other pull other license crap
Enshittification. Open source is a valuable guarantee against that.
1. It's the other way around: because people don't care that much, that's why there is almost exclusively proprietary hardware around.
2. The people who require the "higher grades" of being open source are simply not a large enough market
3. Being open source is not a natural advantage of a product, in fact, it's more of a risk, liability, responsibility, and effort than being proprietary.
Hence, proprietary is the default.
Read Reflections on Trusting Trust to understand why having little bits of binary blobs sprinkled all over your compute arch is actually a major problem. Just because it’s a hard problem doesn’t mean we’re gonna pretend it’s fine.
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.
There’s a way to fix Ken’s problem with zero trust. I’ll release it soon.
Reflections on Trusting Trust has never been a real problem, though.
FOSS enthusiasts are the worst customers imaginable. Not only are they pedantic to the absurd levels you mention, they are also political extremists and will start a witch hunt unless you and your entire company does exactly as they say in every matter imaginable.
And worst of all: They are incredibly cheap and don't want to spend any of their money on high quality products or services. Scream at every dollar they have to spend. "I'm better off with this hand-me-down computer that my sister gave me when her office job upgraded machines".
Trying to please FOSS people is like opening a five star budget restaurant for people with complicated allergies. You're going to deal with the worst of humanity and go broke in the process.
Above a certain complexity, there is basically no 100% open-source hardware out there.
Like none of the Pinephone, Librem, Framework laptops are "open-source" to the bone.
Given how easy is to put and keep hidden malware into devices, governments should demand openness in that field as well. By "putting malware" I don't mean script kiddies in their moms basement but malware/spyware planted by design, which is extremely easy to do if you're the manufacturer, extremely easy to demand/force if you're the government above that manufacturer, and extremely hard to detect if you're a different user in a different country under a government that didn't demand full openness. I know it's impossible as business rules go, but ideally it shouldn't be.
The thing is governments are the people doing it, and most governments want to be able to put backdoors in more badly than they want other governments to not put backdoors in.
Every intel processor has a closed source IME, which is probably a NSA backdoor.
Isn’t minix open source?
Yes, the original is, but it's under a permissive license so Intel don't have to release the modified source code of their version.
Precursor is fully open though, https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor
It's not. Most of the ICs and components are not open. Most notably the Xilinx XC7S50 FPGA. It does go much further then any other phone.
Open silicon is a big leap beyond open hardware schematics and BOMs that allow people to repair boards, or redesign them to use alternative components.
Precursor is the most open personal computing device that can be built currently.
The comment I replied to was about being "fully open". That indeed goes beyond open hardware. Precursor could go further by at least using an FPGA that has great open source tooling support. It's also not impossible to fab an open FPGA but that's also another hard(and expensive) step.
Precursor goes far, but definitely not as far as currently possible.
> Above a certain complexity, there is basically no 100% open-source hardware out there. > > Like none of the Pinephone, Librem, Framework laptops are "open-source" to the bone.
As an aside, GNU Librephone aims to rectify that by reverse-engineering those blobs and develop their own firmware for baseband chips etc. But I am carefully optimistic about the success since it is a relatively new project and quite a moonshot, even though I would personally stand first in line to buy one if it would materialize.
The framework laptop , any hard drive ( meaning the hard drives , internal system software ) would not be open source. the embedded software in a SSD , possibly, but the chips could have backdoors etc
The BeTrusted/Precursor devices and Raptor Engineering workstations are actually 100% open software and schematics.
So don't say 100%? Not hard.
Human speech is not mathematical formalism. What would even "open-source" mean in case of hardware, is there a consensus on it to begin with? Is it only 'every firmware is open-source and available', or would you want the whole floorplan of the chip?
So given that the word doesn't really apply to hardware, I believe they used it correctly (100% means the set of things where it makes sense to be used) and are not misleading. In fact I strongly dislike some of the "open-hardware" marketing of some previously mentioned devices, when that is obviously false and misleading.
"Not needing binary blobs" would be a start, wouldn't it?
I don't know, depends on a lot of stuff. If you are interested in this property from a security perspective, then no -- it's trivial to have hardware backdoors without any binary blobs.
This likely would also mean that it can't be flashed, so if you care about future maintainability, this is also a negative -- it can not be updated/fixed in the future, which may or may not make sense depending on what part we are talking about.
But if there are some kind of signature validation then it gets even more complicated (like e.g. iphone screens knowing if they are from apple or not).
> I don't know, depends on a lot of stuff. If you are interested in this property from a security perspective, then no -- it's trivial to have hardware backdoors without any binary blobs.
This is a "necessary but not sufficient" thing.
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 the market.
However, if the periphery of the software you put out is closed source, even though this periphery is optional, it's not fair or ethical to say it's 100% open source.
From my perspective, it can be said it's open core, and it's pretty fair, and acceptable in my case, but writing 100% Open Source* (*: 100% of the open part of the software stack, exceptions apply) is not fair game. It's misleading.
Seems a bunch are angry about this, honestly, 100% of what they made/control is open source was a good enough bar for me. Specially if all closed components are optional. I value the flexibility of being able to use or not even closed stuff. It's unclear to me what the issue is, false advertisement ? This is as good as it gets for things like this, maybe the "100%" was indelicate, but I wouldn't go so far as misleading. I can also understand the hardware companies, history has shown that the vast majority of industry actors have a purely parasitical relation to open source, and have no qualms copying/stealing IP.
Personally, I'm not angry. On the contrary, I'm pretty neutral about closed-source, optional add-ons. I started playing/working with computers pretty early, and the current state is an utopia when compared to olden times in terms of Free and Open Source software (OTOH, both Free Software and Open Source is under heavy attack because of many reasons I won't enter here).
What bothers me is "100%" part of the open source claim. I personally like the Debian model a lot. It's DFSG compliant by default, and if non-free software is needed, it's attainable. Debian is "as Free as you want, as closed as you need".
I see, new Pebble follows the same model, and it's perfectly fine, but branding it as 100% Open Source is not.
I'll not discuss hardware companies. It's a can of worms that doesn't belong to that reply. Let's say while I understand some of their reservations, these reservation doesn't change that they're greedy and selfish (beyond acceptable limits).
Surprising because you'd think the hardware itself would be their primary moat.
Hardware isn't that hard to copy paste really, to make it hard you need to use really expensive processes (extreme uv etc), but otherwise, mostly you can pretty much take a picture. (very grossly speaking here, but just saying, the software is definitely a critical part)
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. This will always be the case. More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future. The core Pebble watch software stack (everything you need to use your Pebble watch) will always be open source.
100% should mean 100%
If they are not mandatory it's 100%. Otherwise according to your standard, Debian is not 100% free software either.
Debian doesn't advertise itself as 100% open source, either.
Main and Contrib has to obey DFSG guidelines, and there's an optional non-free repository which you can enable if you prefer.
Firmware is a gnarly can of worms though, and while I prefer 100% free firmware myself, companies are not brave enough to open that part of their ecosystem, yet, if ever.
Companies typically move more and more functionality to closed firmware, so they can ”open source” a thin wrapper, like a driver, that is often completely useless, and often encumbered with cryptography restrictions, strict trademarks and software patents anyway.
This is not always true.
NVIDIA does exactly what you said. Move everything to firmware and closed GL libraries, and open source a kernel module to facilitate communication. They even created different firmware versions to prevent open source drivers to use the whole card.
AMD did the inverse: They re-implemented a fully open driver from scratch, opened up the specs, made every part which they can make (legally) accessible, accessible, open sourced ROCm and send in packages to major distributions' (main / open source) repositories. Their firmware is closed source, but it's obtainable and doesn't require signatures to enable the card. They even clashed with HDMI forums to make a libre implementation of v2.1, but the forum basically threatened them.
Intel's graphics drivers are basically the same with AMD.
Broadcom / Intel / Realtek NICs work without their respective firmware blobs, yet their offloading capabilities are disabled. Either way, the drivers are completely open source and in the kernel mainline.
Same for most sound cards sans Creative Labs. I want to hit them with a foam cluebat so bad.
Logitech's all stuff works with open drivers. They are the primary contributor to V4L standard, standardize their webcam interfaces and provide drivers or help.
Do you have any examples in mind?
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100% of their own software.
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> More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future.
That sounds ominous.
I can understand not being able to remove non-free dependencies that were used previously, but that sounds like they intend to create new non-free components.
IMHO, it's much closer to 100% than an iWatch or a Garmin.
1% is closer to 100%, than 0% is, yes.
They said 100% of Pebble Watch software. The binary blobs are other people's software.
Closed verilog I can accept. But in general firmware is also software, for example it has become quite popular in the recent years to execute firmware on an embedded riscv cpu. And move more and more functionality to that kind of firmware.
I'm sure its happened before, but this is the first time i finally get to see some sort of modern hardware in KiCad.
Pretty cool to see all 6 layers, paste layers, and adhesive layers as well. I've always wondered how the cake was made and if big projects do/could use KiCad. Seems like a lot more work relative to those Single Layer PCBs on YouTube for things like emulators and custom PCBs. Glad I now know for sure, that I can't do this.
Paste and adhesive are spat out by KiCad as part of the manufacturing outputs. It works pretty much the same way other EDA packages like altium do - the extra layers are part of the part footprint. If you don’t design your own footprints it’s basically no extra work to generate those.
You almost certainly could do it - obviously with some time investment. Getting multi layer PCBs made is surprisingly affordable now.
The Reform laptop project is open hardware: https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform
I encourage you to browse it, I found that while challenging, it does not seem unreachable to get to that level of proficiency in KiCad.
Depends on any project ideas, but as a newbie to hardware dev and with my own small scope eurorack module idea, I am having a lot of luck with flux.ai. Even got a small order of 5 PCBs printed for under $200.
It's great to see the app open-sourced! Hopefully this can be distributed on F-Droid one day soon!
And the ability to choose app repos is also a wonderful development. Nothing against Rebble at all, but more choices and more openness is always better!
This is awesome. What a way to do a relaunch. I was a Pebble user in 2013 on first release and saddened when it all broke down. I was so turned off from that experience that I swore off smart watches (I wear a Casio now).
This could get me back, though I’ll admit the appeal has gone down since I’ve realized how nice it is to create separation between me and my notifications.
At most smart watches you can turn them off. And at your phone too.
I like the gamification and some notifications (today its 5 degrees colder than yesterday for example)
(Un)related new post made by rebble today: https://rebble.io/2025/11/24/rebble-in-your-own-world.html
Doesn't address the multiple feed support for the app store, and seems to be calling Eric to action a few times, but it would be too much of a coincidence that these two posts come out so close to one another.
Thank you for posting this, it really gave me an answer to the "huh, how did all that drama from last week play out." IMO rebble jumped to some conclusions and felt robbed/cheated by what Eric was doing. With Eric going above and beyond to open source everything, I really feel he is trying to live up to what the original promise of pebble was. It is cool what rebble did to keep the pebble community alive, and I get that they might feel slighted, but if you take all egos out of the equation, what Eric is doing is like the best possible outcome - we get new pebble devices. Isn't that the best possible outcome?
> 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 in the middle, and while this does appear to be more of miscommunication than malice, it's a bit disappointing to me overall.
I see it as the melodramatic theater that goes hand in hand with the development of tech we love. Linux lore is by all measures filled with these types of moments, and as time goes on there are moments of peace and moments of chaos. With any luck the end users live to see another day of tech or software they enjoy. It’s part of our story as humans.
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
Agreed -- if someone outright accuses you of lying and stealing, posting evidence against those allegations seems completely reasonable to me.
through all of this, it really feels like rebble didn't know what they want (as they say). the future collaboration with eric also sounds like they don't know what they want. they want a third party mediator for... something. Eric was already prepared to pay them per user, which seemed generous to me to begin with.
It sounds to me like Rebble (the board + community) should figure out what they want before trying to proceed, lest they further waste time and good-faith negotiating capital. like are they unhappy with the previous payment rate per user? or something else?
To me it speaks to the fact that Rebble is not really an organization that is in a position to actually negotiate a long term deal with another company and go through all the trials and tribulations that involves.
That is not a criticism of them nor is it surprising, their responsibility up to now has been to maintain a core set of open source software. A loosely structured control structure is entirely appropriate for that task. But it really does not work when instead of bringing one person representing the company to a negotiation, you have half a dozen people who all have their own thoughts and levels of interest and commitment, some of whom will resort to community action if they don't like something about the process.
It seems like Rebble (the board) really overplayed their hand.
From what they posted, it seems like they wanted more control over what Core was doing, deciding that the best way to do that was to try and hold the app store data hostage.
Now, with the Core app open sourced and multiple app store repos supported, Rebble's position will likely be greatly diminished from what it could have been if they had been satisfied with what they had. I guess in the end though, the outcome was a net win for everyone (fully open source apps), so it works out.
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 more clearly than any other explanation I've found (or they've elucidated).
My best understanding (which I've extrapolated from what I've learned) is that they had all these plans of being a scrappy team who worked together on PebbleOS in their spare time, as friends, and Eric capitalising a company of paid developers has made all those plans redundant - so they've been powering through the five stages of grief in coming to terms with that while everyone else has been celebrating the return of Pebble.
> 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.
Having also lurked in their Discord, I think your analysis is pretty much spot-on!
The complete 180 is jarring.
They went from “Core Devices to stealing and everything is terrible and we are making demands” to “Actually everything was fine all along oopsy sorry for the misunderstandings”…
Also I'm Eric's post rebble is only mentioned a single time. I first thought it was zero! Good for Eric.
I'm excited that the back will screw off so we can replace the battery. I'm curious about waterproofing. Will that hold? Will we need to replace a gasket or other parts, in addition to the battery?
The watch is only listed as water resistant, not waterproof. I don't know if he's said anything specific about the Time 2, but for the 2 Duo (same target water resistance rating) he's written about the water resistance here: https://ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-2-duo-is-in-mass-production . He says you shouldn't take the watch swimming, shouldn't expose it to hot water like a shower (weakens the glue and eliminates the water resistance), and shouldn't expose it to high pressure water. They seem designed mainly to protect against incidental splashes rather than any serious water exposure.
True but he does say "it is waterproofed" [1] and this is the common way of referring to this level of water resistance (IPX8, 1 meter for 30 mins). I wouldn't take it in a hot shower, but IPX8 should be good for more than being "water resistant" to incidental splashes.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTlRBI2QCzM
In the video, the green thing is the gasket. It should be reusable, but nothing's guaranteed in the world of waterproofing.
I really like the look of the Pixel watch 4's approach to this:
https://www.ifixit.com/News/113620/the-pixel-watch-4-is-the-...
That is incredibly fantastic feat of engineering!
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 Time 2 (the watch I bought to replace my Fossil HR Collider which replaced my orig. Pebble 2) is user serviceable. I had to open my Pebble 2 because my buttons were falling off. I bought a second hand donor (Pebble OC, since I ditched my broken Pebble OC at some point) and unfortunately I failed to succeed the transplantation of the buttons. Which made me very sad.
I also very much liked you could turn the radios off on the Pebble 2. The HR was useless though. But if I want a good quality of that, I'd go for Garmin or (if I were in the Apple ecosystem) an Apple Watch.
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.
I think Pebble only recently worked again with iOS. I don't use iOS, I use AOSP-based OS. So for me, Apple Watch isn't an option, since it doesn't work well with that. Battery life and being able to replace the battery is also important to me.
Yeah I find the Time 2 design to be kind of fugly, but the screwed assembly is definitely tempting me to pick one up. Very nice feature.
(A lot of the original Pebbles were ugly too, but in a way that I personally found more appealingly utilitarian. Or maybe I'm just used to them.)
They've made two big changes that are surely the result of the recent drama:
* The companion app is now completely open source, ensuring that the community can continue supporting the watches if Core goes under.
* You can subscribe to multiple app stores while optionally paying for services, and Core will maintain their own store. This seems to placate Rebble so they can do their thing and provide their paid services.
Seems like very good steps forward overall.
I plan on picking one of these new Pebbles up in the next batch. I loved my original Pebbles (I still have my old Time Steel). Before the Pebbles came back and PebbleOS open-sourced, the only real open smartwatch option we had around that I'm aware of is the PineTime, which I currently wear every day rocking Infinitime.
Will be fun to pick up one of these again and be able to hop back and forth between it and the PineTime! Great stuff, Eric and team.
I look forward to a year or two from now when there will be dozens of pebble clones just rolling out of factories for the price of a midrange Casio watch.
This along with valve's hardware announcement is quite a shot at all the entreched hardware manufacturers.
Love to see this! I personally find this incredibly exciting. There is a major death of hardware out there that is user-respecting and hacker-friendly, and it warms my heart immensely to see such committments. I'm buying two today (one for me and one for my wife)!
Don’t have much to add except huge congrats on relaunching. What a move, not only bringing it back from the dead, but also doing it in a way that many people dream that companies would. I just bought an Apple Watch, but this is really tempting.
> We are trying our best to get into mass production and ship out at most several thousand Pebble Time 2s before CNY [which starts in January].
> Realistically, at this time we’re forecasting that the majority of people will receive their PT2 in March and April.
If the factories close for 3 weeks for CNY, then why will the second batch arrive 2-3 months after the first batch?
Good question! (I am the Pebble founder)
When factories restart, not all of the workers who were working there before actually come back to work. Some of them stay in their hometowns or they get other jobs. This means that restarting the production line actually means retraining people on how to assemble the product. There is also an entire supply chain behind the assembly line that takes time to restart. Think of all the sub-components like plastics, metal components, etc. that need to be built at respective factories. It takes time to ship them to the primary factory for final assembly and test.
After the product gets assembled, there are several stages of testing, like gluing, environmental testing, final assembly test, and packaging, that take time as well. Then the product has to be shipped to the fulfillment center, packaged, labeled, and then shipped out. Each step time, and the process needs to completely re-start after CNY.
Thanks for explaining this. Would you estimate that the January units will be more likely to have issues than the later ones, since they'll be first off the line? Or will there be no changes to the components/process that might make the later units more reliable?
A good manufacturing process (with the appropriate level of testing) should result in yield variations, not quality variations. i.e. if the line is running less well for some reason, then you end up throwing more in the bin rather than shipping bad product.
They should be identical.
Sorry to hijack, but are there plans to re-manufacture the Pebble 2 Duo in black?
I was one of the pre-orderers that was offered either a refund or a white version and chose the refund because I really had my heart set on the black and don't want a color screen.
I'm also an OG Pebble enthusiast, although sadly my old one is long gone.
Eric has made it clear that the Pebble 2 Duo was always going to be a limited run because it was made mostly of leftover components and there's no reasonable path towards making new copies of those components.
> Pebble 2 Duo is sold out! We are not making more.
https://ericmigi.com/blog/how-to-build-a-smartwatch-software...
That's really disappointing! I want BW eink screen, I'm not interested in colour version at all.
It really is, I wish there were a version of the Time 2 that had a BW screen. I did manage to snag one of the Pebble 2 Duos before they sold out and I love it. The contrast and reflectivity is unbeatable.
Out of curiosity, what's the downside of color? The screen on the new watches is also substantially larger. AFAIK there's no discernible battery life penalty for the color watches (even with the larger screen).
Price, durability, battery life, contrast ratio and overall not usability for my needs.
I may be wrong, but I think they mean ship from the factory to the distribution point so that could add some time between an item being made and shipped to a customer
But I've never done anything like this, so ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
This is great news! I know the new Pebble has a small team and is focused on being a long term sustainable enterprise. This should help with that goal quite a bit.
I received my Pebble 2 Duo about a month ago, and it is awesome. Nice job and thank you! I feel 10 years younger :)
I see a future where FOSS designs for consumer products compete with commercial releases.
It will take far more sophisticated micro-manufacturing (like 3d-printing but different tools handling more types of materials).
Get the jacket in your exact size with the best materials. Benefit from having incrementally improved from the original (for example under arm vent zipper angle improved). All of it unbranded or custom branded.
Seems hard to believe annual released, mass manufacturing will compete.
Really? To me it seems hard to believe that small-scale manufacturing could ever meaningfully compete with economies of scale.
My experience is that consumer products, for example winter jackets, have gone down in quality and way, way up in price.
The designs themselves are often just bad. It is almost like consumers are punished for not spending enough with bad color options. (You can see this in running shoes as well)
Even if the right aesthetic and function is found, there's no real consideration of body type or shape, you get a few sizes to choose from.
I think big brands have consumers over a barrel today. When the design and materials assembly are solved, I think people will pay more to get the thing they want. And I think they're more likely to keep them longer as a result.
Sitting here with my white pebble 2 duo just glad they resolved all this drama. Was not fun seeing the explosion days after getting it!
Is it me or is the "Rivian blue" that he refers to in the video not that close to the color of actual Rivians? IMO the watch band/insert color is less green and quite a bit lighter. Not bad, per se, but I feel like this is not the best descriptor since it might make people think it's a different color.
Material color is very tough, especially comparing metallic paint to polycarbonate. Lighting matters, reflections matter. We tried our best, but yes, obviously it's not exactly the same.
I don't know if using them would wreck the economics of the matter, but this is exactly why Pantone exists. Perhaps Rivian uses them, and someone there might be willing to share with you the exact Pantone code.
Pantone doesn't work for metal and reflective surfaces, because as the poster above said, reflections and viewing angles have an impact.
And of course, video adds another layer of complexity. Would you say that the video looks accurate to you, or does calling it "Rivian blue" help people understand what it looks like in real life?
I don't actually own a Rivian. I've seen them from afar. They look cool. I have not held a Pebble Time up to a Rivian yet. Maybe I'll creepily do that in downtown Palo Alto today :)
I will await your photo post on (where else?) Bluesky.
Get your creep on, for science!
No need to creep. It appears there is a Rivian store in Palo Alto. [1]
Surely they must have one on hand in their namesake blue.
1: https://rivian.com/spaces/palo-alto
As someone who has been working on a pair of smart glasses running RTOS, and having to make companion apps for both iOS and Android, I am very interested in reading your approaches to a lot of the same problems I have faced. There's not a lot of information out there on these topics.
In terms of long-term market viability, have you considered whether your success could encourage Apple or other large competitors to make a battery life-optimized version of their smartwatches?
I understand that some Pebble fans are all about the customization, and will be with you forever. But probably many people care mostly about the battery life, which is severely lacking in watches from Apple, Google, etc.
If Apple realized there was a big enough market to justify making a $200 Apple Watch Basic, how much could that undercut your business?
Relatedly, when will we learn more about the other "core" devices that you're contemplating, and which you alluded to in the video? Building more of a unique ecosystem could help with the moat.
> In terms of long-term market viability, have you considered whether your success could encourage Apple or other large competitors to make a battery life-optimized version of their smartwatches?
Companies like Garmin, Coros and Suunto already make less-smart-watches with weeks of battery life, and those haven't convinced Apple to budge from only making watches that do everything under the sun but barely last a day. Another long-lasting watch from a tiny brand probably isn't going to move the needle.
IDK about Coros or Suunto, but the only Garmins with a battery life approaching 30 days cost ~$1,000. This could be competition for AWU, but wouldn't communicate that there is demand for a more basic/long-lasting Apple Watch.
Smart watches with long battery life exist. Garmin watches generally have ~2 week battery life:
* Venu 3 for $350 has 2 week battery life [1]
* Forerunner 55 for $150 has 2 week battery life [2]
I don't see why you are defining success as 30 days of battery life when the baseline is charging your watch every day.
[1] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/873008/pn/010-02784-00/
[2] https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/741137/
The baseline for watches is changing the battery every 3-5 YEARS! This modernity of charging watches daily is a pox on humanity brought on by Apple.
Pebble (and Fitbit, and others) were always in the "week-plus" timeframe for charging. Meeting the "minimum bar" of 14-17 days battery life (of the OG pebbles) is successful. Shooting for "30 days" is definitively best-in-class performance for smart-watches!
> I don't see why you are defining success as 30 days of battery life when the baseline is charging your watch every day.
Up until about 10 years ago, no one would have considered the baseline to be charging your watch every day. Even today, most watches/wrist-worn step counters don't require daily charging.
I wouldn't define 30 days as success, but I do want to start out at 2+ weeks. Battery life gets worse over time, and watches aren't meant to last for just a little while. I don't want to spend hundreds of dollars on something that will require charging more than once a week within a year or two.
Appreciate the links, but I'm guessing these are estimates with AOD disabled? That's another benefit of the Pebble (AOD doesn't reduce battery life).
30 days is asking a lot of any reasonably sized smartwatch, but if you set your sights a bit lower then a $250 Coros Pace 4 will do ~3 weeks with AOD off, ~1 week with AOD on, and 30-40 hours of continuous GPS recording. That's still a lot longer than any Apple Watch even if it's not hitting the 30 day milestone.
My Coros Pace 2 was my solution to my desire for a less smart watch. It cost $200 when I got it 3 years ago. I run a ton and the exercise features of the Pebble just didn’t do it for me (and I don’t want to keep swapping watches based on what I’m doing). I easily get 2+ weeks with 7-8 exercises with GPS on. The screen is some variation of those transflective LCDs or MIPs LCDs.
I can never go back to a 2 day battery life for a watch, even if my 5 year old iPhone technically can’t make it through half a day of use….
> The screen is some variation of those transflective LCDs or MIPs LCDs.
They just switched to OLED with the Pace 4, for better or worse. AOD battery life took a hit but it does look a lot nicer than MIP.
Yeah, I’m not sure if I like that choice from them. I really like the look of their non OLED displays. This has been my favorite running watch, and I’ve used it the longest out of all the different watches I’ve had. Although if I want them to keep existing as a company I should consider buying another.
Yeah I don't need 30 days, but starting out at a week with AOD puts a pretty low ceiling on future battery life. Appreciate the pointer though.
In thinking further, I realized that the buttons are actually a pretty good moat against the big tech company competitors. Their UIs are all about touchscreens, so they'll never have as many/useful buttons as Pebbles do.
Unlikely pebble to get 30days with garmin type usage either. A forerunner with mip display should survive for 2+ weeks though
I've got an Instinct Solar 2x and it does last 30 days for me, and it's much cheaper than $1000.
Didn't realize Garmin made monochrome solar watches. It is much cheaper. However, looks like an absolute tank, which would not fit under many shirtsleeves...
Unfortunately, they have been replacing in new models the monochrome MIP display with colorful AMOLED with less battery life.
When I first bought my pixel watch 2 I was able to optimize the settings to get almost 3 days of battery life.
A year of firmware updates later, I am back down to less than 2 days using the same settings.
I don't think the big manufacturers are going to change their ways anytime soon...
I sold my Pixel Watch 2, but I wasn't able to get two days' worth. The sacrifices weren't worth it.
Namely, you'd have to turn off the always on screen (I gave this up easily), as well as "flick to wake", which I found harder to give up.
If I were to press a button on my watch to read a notification, I may as well use my phone. YMMV.
Apart from all the awesome annoucements, what really makes me happy is how quickly this went from internet drama to both parties moving towards doing whats best for the community.
Props to Core and Rebble for making Pebble what it is today and casting a bright future for theses watches. Been happily wearing my Pebble Steel for the past month after replacing its battery, looking forward to the PT2!
Ew open you say? Micropython-watch is actually useful, you can program it do things while on the run. Did not make it perse, but I added webrepl-button to it.
https://github.com/timonoko/t-watch-2020-micropython-hacks
I'm very not in the smart watch game but a fully open watch with a bunch of sensors and connectivity sounds very appealing. However, I find square watch faces to be extremely unattractive. What's the latest in open watches with round faces and relatively thin profile?
Eric has hinted at wanting to build a round Pebble (like the Pebble Time Round, presumably), so hopefully things will go well with the initial batches and we'll be graced with the presence of a PTR in time for Christmas 2026.
I wish someone would take on an open-source project for a sports watch with full features like vo2max estimation, etc.
like a cyanogenmod or lineageos but for an older watch model
someone has completely decompiled the firmware for the Garmin Forerunner 245 which is very similar to a Fenix 5
imagine if someone took on making open firmware for it
https://github.com/anvilsecure/garmin-ciq-app-research/
if taking on a brand name might incur lawsuits there are other watches like the wahoo rival which was completely retired and they got out of the business (it was only $99 too)
or there are other ppen hardware options from China
Is there a vibration mechanism? That’s a must-have in a watch for me.
There is, but I would set expectations lower than Apple's "taptic engine" where they designed their own hardware with a team of engineers and a bazillion dollars.
One of the recent development updates mentioned adding a global "vibrate on hour" setting which historically had to be implemented as an option by the specific watchface you're using.
I’ll be comparing to a Timex Expedition Grid Shock, which I’ve been using for years. Have no idea why they discontinued it. Suspect it had something to do with clueless leadership who undervalue customer satisfaction.
Do they want the community to help fix bugs (Even tho I suppose they don't hv any secret sauce), or enable users to customize the software...
My current smartwatch is $7 I got from the thrift store. Not only does it offer everything an Apple Watch offers, but it also measures blood pressure (surprisingly accurate) and has a small flashlight, and I charge it once every 3 weeks. The only issue is its app is limited and you can’t customize anything besides the watch faces and the wrist strap. So having that, it’s really hard to compete if you are just going to offer another smartwatch, which is a great strategy to open source the software and allow customization, even on the hardware level to some degree. Myself and a lot of people would be interested to have that!
Do you know what algorithm or sensors it uses to calculate BP?
I honestly don’t even know the model, as the Bluetooth pairing name is just some number, the app (iOS) is called “Da fit” if that will help you. I was thinking before about tearing it down but it’s waterproof and I know this process will ruin it and won’t be able to use it while swimming or similar.
Great solution, great example of how open source should be done.
That's good to hear!
If the health monitoring is reliable, im sold. I want to move on from apples clutches despite the pebble hardware not looking particularly attractive to me
> Yesterday, Pebble watch software was ~95% open source. Today, it’s 100% open source. You can download, compile and run all the software you need to use your Pebble. We just published the source code for the new Pebble mobile app!
Except...
> 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. This will always be the case. More non-free software components may appear in our software in the future. The core Pebble watch software stack (everything you need to use your Pebble watch) will always be open source.
So 100% FOSS, except for the parts that are closed source now, and any that they add later.
The important thing is that all the code written by Core Devices is open source. They can't force third parties to open their code, but they're opening all of their own work. And that proprietary code is not required to use the watches. Most of them don't even have heart rate sensors, and clearly Memfault is not required. They're committing to maintaining a 100% open source version that still allows you to use the watches with minimal compromise.
Then say "Pebble Watch Software written by Core Devices Is Now 100% Open Source", or "Pebble mobile app open sourced" (that seems to be the major actual change?), or something like that. The thing they've actually done should be commended, but that doesn't mean ignoring that they've chosen to make a claim in the headline that isn't actually true.
I understand the desire for more literal communication, but it's not the world we live in
Part of this is driven by necessity, for example, cellular network chips are typically binary blobs, etc. as mentioned, the heart rate sensor is a binary blob and that's likely because there are no good OSS solutions for those components.
A lot of battery firmwares are closed source, the way that they fixed this for the early pinephone was literally just staring at a memory listing and aiming a heat gun at the battery to see how it reacted when it went hot.
Sure; I'm aware that embedded sucks. And to be clear, this is (IMHO) tolerable so long as the blobs are redistributable. But then maybe don't headline with "100% open source". It's better to be honest about it.
I see your point, but it feels more like the difference between 99% fat free and 100% fat free. Technically measurable, but irrelevant in practice when the alternatives are all basically closed source.
To some people, it's more like "99% shellfish free." I personally don't mind that the cellular radio is closed-source, but I'm also not allergic to shellfish.
> I see your point, but it feels more like the difference between 99% fat free and 100% fat free.
Then why not have the headline say "99% open source"? IMO, either it doesn't matter and you can just say that it's almost all FOSS, or it does matter and you really shouldn't be lying about it.
> Technically measurable, but irrelevant in practice when the alternatives are all basically closed source.
The alternatives are the pinetime, watchy, and bangle.js, which AFAIK are also ~95% FOSS. I guess Apple and Google also offer smart watches, but I'd argue that those are so different in terms of features that they're not really direct competitors.
Yeah, it's weird because they're the ones writing that headline, and the claim is that it's 100% open source. They didn't have to word it that way, they chose to.
I see that kind of thing more often labeled "open hardware" rather than open source.
That's a different thing. They're also doing at least some degree of open hardware:
> We’ve also published electrical and mechanical design files for Pebble 2 Duo. Yes, you can download the schematic (includes KiCad project files) right now on Github! This should give you a nice jumpstart to designing your own PebbleOS-compatible device.
But this is about the software/firmware running on it.
I'm not sure if you're splitting hairs or not. I definitely thought this post would be about them finding open source alternatives to binary firmware, but if it doesn't interoperate with optional non-free software then it is not Open Source.
It seems to be comparable to debian, and that's as open source as it gets.
Yeah, it's a perfectly fine place to land. My objection is completely to claiming to be 100% open source when it isn't; if they'd just said 99% open source, or that everything they'd written was now open, then I wouldn't mind (or at least, I'd view it as unfortunate, but I wouldn't be upset with them).
This is classic HN. At first infuriating if it corrects ME, and then amusing.
Yeah, but it's running on a device that has closed source blobs in it. Hell, even the linux kernel often has firmware blobs for wifi devices.
They don't really have a choice with those modules
95% is 100% free
Eric, congrats. Typo in the first photo caption: "in all it's glory" -> "in all its glory"
So is the FORTRAN75 compiler, but it’s still being used.
Love open source
"Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, You hereby grant to Core Devices and to recipients of software distributed by Core Devices a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Your Contributions and such derivative works."
A few years from now we will see the usual HN thread were contributors lachrymosely complain about how their precious work was stolen by a good-turned-evil organization.
Please note our CLA explicitly include a clause to require Core Devices to distribute all contributions under an OSI-compatible FOSS license (e.g. GPLv3). So no contributions can be 'stolen'.
https://ericmigi.notion.site/Core-Devices-Software-Licensing...
But OSI-compatible FOSS licenses include pushover ones like MIT, so even though you couldn't steal all of the contributions to make a proprietary fork, any other company then could.
The CLA very well allows them to use all of the contributions to make a proprietary fork. The license is irrelevant for that[1].
Calling it "stealing" doesn't help.
[1] I'd usually call it a distraction, a sleigh of hand, smoke and mirrors, but we have to give Eric credit for not burying the CLA.
well, their new app mentioned in the post is GPL.
but in the rest of the ecosystem a bunch of the inherited code is already Apache or MIT. so, i presume you have already forked the other repos to relicense them. can you drop a link?
I'm the first to agree that contributions can't be stolen in this scenario but read the threads I'm referring to. People feel that way anyway if you stop supporting a component or distribute your focus between a free and a paid tier.
What we need is more awareness that looking at the license alone is not enough to make an informed decision if contributing to a project is aligned with the contributors attitude and personal goals.
With that in mind: Thank you for putting the CLA right in the repo where it belongs and people can easily find it. Many organizations put a license upfront and bury the CLA. For a particularly bad example try MonoDB.
> lachrymosely
Learned a new word, thank you!
The h is peculiar, as the latin word reads `lacrimosus`
Interesting etymology:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/lachrymose
Greek dakryma
"-d- to -l- alteration in Latin"
"The Medieval Latin practice of writing -ch- for -c- before Latin -r- also altered anchor, pulchritude, sepulchre. The -y- is pedantic, from the former belief that the word was pure Greek."
Pebble was bought a long time ago by google yea? So this already happened
not exactly, fitbit acquired pebble in 2016, and google acquired fitbit in 2021. so while google did end up with the IP in the end, they did the Right Thing this year and open-sourced PebbleOS.
i don't normally praise google, but i am glad their open-sourcing of pebbleOS here enabled this new revival of Pebble devices.
Also includes news about a new Appstore, which can probably be seen as a reaction to the stories from last week:
https://ericmigi.com/blog/pebble-watch-software-is-now-100pe...I read the drama last week, and after seeing this, I have to side with Rebble. I think they kept the community alive since Eric M cashed out and Fitbit shut it down. As the stars have aligned in recent years, Eric revives Pebble, but if Rebble wouldn't spend all the effort maintaining the app store, his consumer base would be much smaller and it would be much harder to bootstrap again.
With Repebble (Core Devices) and their new appstore (or/and apt-style repository system), Rebble seems obsolete, it's a bit sad. They deserve credit which they won't be able to claim anymore. They should be rewarded somehow for bridging the dark age, otherwise it seems they served purpose all until Eric returned and said "Thank You and fuck off".
Also, to me, Eric talking doesn't sound authentic, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's lying. I don't mean to insult though, mad respect for putting project like Pebble together.
Hope that there's some place and purpose for Rebble in the future.
I'm surprised by this comment; after the drama last week and after seeing this I fully have to side against Rebble.
The nature of driving a healthy open source centered ecosystem is that you don't control it under your iron fist: you make good contributions, users _and_ companies are able to use them in all new ways which comply with the licensing terms. And it seems that RePebble is going way beyond the licensing terms requirements, but bending over backwards to honor Rebble here when they aren't actually required to.
I just can't imagine what people want from RePebble if not this: they are being maximally open, making it so all of everything would be able to continue if they went out of business tomorrow, while also actively enabling people to continue using Rebble's store and paid offerings. Should they be forcing users to use Rebble's offerings (instead of making things even more open) as a reward for doing a good job bridging the dark age?
My impression is that there is a lot more going on than just the facts provided by both sides. Core technologies managed to get Katie Berry to step away from the project[1] and that's extremely significant to me. Her tireless dedication to keeping Pebble alive (and get it open sourced) is how any of this is possible. For her to just up and leave now tells me that Eric and Core are not being as magnanimous and friendly to community as these blogs posts and actions might suggest.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/1ozzsr9/an_update_o...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/1p0huk5/pebble_rebb...
Both of those comments seem to just boil down to "Core probably could be more proactive about comms", which hardly seems like a particularly egregious sin.
"interactions with Core have gone so poorly that they were adversely impacting my mental health"
That seems a little more serious than "could be proactive about comms" especially when this is one of the key people responsible for a lot of the original Pebble tech, rebble tech, and working within Google to get the Pebble OS open sourced.
I think unfortunately this is a normal thing that happens: passionate people get very attached to something and have trouble dealing with dispute even when everyone is relatively good intentioned. I've seen it in the workplace a dozen times.
I agree, and Rebble themselves highlight how inflammatory their initial blog post was in their most recent one: https://rebble.io/2025/11/24/rebble-in-your-own-world.html .
They also backed down from their ludicrous position that they are acting as protectors of other people's watchfaces being downloaded in bulk by a particular company they don't like, whereas they are totally fine with the watchfaces being publicly available for general use. It clearly reads as them trying to clutch control of the one thing they haven't open sourced.
Rebble contributors did have a legitimate gripe, which is that they were lead to develop some additional software under the idea that there would be an agreement at the end of the day. But the Rebble Foundation's response to this was totally immature and irrational.
I agree with what Eric said in his follow up, which is that it is quite concerning to engage in a partnership with an organization which reacts like this as part of a negotiation process. God knows I wouldn't, and it doesn;t surprise me that an alternative solution was found.
Well said and exactly my thoughts on it as well. Eric has done more than he really had to, and it is unclear to me what rebble really wants/is positioning for.
Nobody is saying it out loud. But as always, it’s probably about money.
You are not really factoring in all the work on the hardware, much of the software, and the entirety of the financing, which is being done by Eric and the Core Devices team.
If Rebble wants to take the risk and put out a smartwatch, there is nothing stopping them. Infact all of the open sourcing work Core Devices has done gives them a good starting point.
He gave them a deal that would directly send cash their way, which he didn't have to do at all. The vast majority of founders wouldn't have touched that with a 10 foot pole.
This seems like an overly harsh take.
> They deserve credit which they won't be able to claim anymore.
Why won't they be able to claim credit for the work that they did the past because of other people's work in the present?
> Also, to me, Eric talking doesn't sound authentic, and I wouldn't be surprised if he's lying. I don't mean to insult though, mad respect for putting project like Pebble together.
What the heck are you trying to do here if not insult him? It seems wild to say he sounds inauthentic and you think he's potentially lying, and then try to hedge by saying that's not intended as an insult.
From Eric’s previous blog post, he did not “cash out”:
> I earned almost nothing from Pebble Tech Corp. I paid myself a $65,000 salary each year. I did not get any payout through the asset sale.
Eric also made a pretty detailed writeup a few years ago about what drove the failure and acquisition of the original Pebble company: https://ericmigi.com/blog/success-and-failure-at-pebble
kotlin tho lol
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These watches have an advertised battery life of 30 days. Perhaps you meant to post this in a thread about Apple Watches.
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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.
Apparently I misremembered the story, while Pebble was prototyped in Canada by U of Waterloo guys, when they went startup & kickstarter with the product they moved to California.
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Please don't post grumbly swipes like this on HN. The guidelines ask us not to be curmudgeonly. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ok Rumi. It's my opinion if you don't agree just say I don't agree. Im doing you a favor by giving you an alternative more truthful reality. If you prefer to be in bliss then that's fine but stop acting so sleazy.
We don't need a mini-sermon. We just need you, like everyone, to follow the guidelines. Criticism is fine. Emptiness and thoughtlessness is not. You're welcome not to participate here if you're unwilling to put a little effort and substance into what you post.
Why didn't you update the title. It's not 100% open source. What's the point of the wrong percentage if it's not to exaggerate a false claim?
We did that, but the best way to show you want to contribute positively to HN is to email us (hn@ycombinator.com) rather than raising the issue only after you've been pulled up for abuse.
This title is misleading. As explained in the comments, there are still non-free binary blobs in the firmware. Please reserve phrasing like "100% X" for things that are indeed "0% Not(X)."
They have released 100% of the source they have.