11 ms·

The future of Rebble

381 points by will0 2y ago

https://github.com/google/pebble

dang 2y ago
Well now we have a conundrum - the top 3 posts on the frontpage are all about this! The submitted title of this post was "Google has open-sourced the pebble smartwatch operating system" but it actually points to https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html, so I've changed the title and moved the comments from here to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070, which has the Google announcement. The 3 threads are: We're bringing Pebble back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091 Google open-sources the Pebble OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070 The future of Rebble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 (<-- you are here)
- msolberg 2y ago
  DANG SAVE US hahaha
- zamalek 2y ago
  Let them them revvel in this glory IMO :), it's rare to see this kind of thing happen in the hardware space.
- HaZeust 2y ago
  Good exercise of your sequence priority philosophy, but I also think they all have their own right to be posted and discussed - this is exciting, and different angles and POVs can be brought to each thread. One is about Google's affairs with Pebble, one is about the community-grown Rebble, and one is about the founding team of the original Pebble itself.
  - dang 2y ago
    I agree! though it's usually hard for the comments to stay partitioned that way.
TheMagicHorsey 2y ago
I'm curious if anyone has tried one of the newer e-ink smart watches you see on Alibaba, which use ESP-32 or other low-power SOCs. I saw one recently at a meet-up and the guy who was wearing claimed it was completely open-source and he could run whatever he wanted to on it. It did not have heartrate monitoring or anything other than clock on it, as far as I could tell.
- andyjohnson0 2y ago
  What did it look like? All the ones I've seen have been pretty ugly - plastic cases, etc.
  - TheMagicHorsey 2y ago
    It looked like exactly what you said. Plastic.
- throwup238 2y ago
  The original was Watchy: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/ https://watchy.sqfmi.com/ Not only can you run anything you want on it but it supports the Arduino IDE and Micropython. I assume all of the Alibaba ones are based off of Watchy.
  - bigiain 2y ago
    I have one of this still in it's box unassembled. I like the idea. But I've been wearing mechanical watches for about a decade now...
- Avamander 2y ago
  The biggest issue is the software. It's mostly abysmal. The best effort I've seen so far has been InfiniTime for the PineTime. It's very difficult without full-time employees working on improving things.
MostlyStable 2y ago
Some commenters mentioned that the e-ink screen (and the accompanying battery life) was one reason why the Pebble is so beloved, which reminded me of the Basis Peak, which was primarily a health tracker watch with some (very limited) smart functionality (mostly just some notifications, if I recall), that also had an e-ink screen and a nearly 1 week battery life and had a sort of similar trajectory: Bought by Intel, then killed two years later after a battery related recall issue. It was, in my opinion, by far the best fitness tracker watch ever, and remains so to this day. Not so much because of it's actual features (which were relatively standard), but the software paradigm of simple yet effective exercise gamification that helped encourage exercise habit formation. 8 years later and I still miss it.
- ClassyJacket 2y ago
  Pebble had an LCD screen. It didn't use Eink at all. You can look this up, it was an LCD display manufactured by Sharp.
  - MostlyStable 2y ago
    I never had one, but doing some quick googling, it looks like at least some models had an e-ink display. Certainly several commenters seemed to think it did.
    - will0 2y ago
      It was a transflective memory LCD, which Pebble marketed as "E-Paper" (not the same as E-Ink)
      - Groxx 2y ago
        An excellent one at that. It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit. I've got a Bangle.js 2 at the moment and while I mostly like it, the screen is nowhere near as nice. Transflective is still very obviously what I want in a watch though, even the best oleds don't even come close in visibility.
freedomben 2y ago
I'm a little confused at the moving pieces here. We have RePebble, Rebble, and PebbleOS. PebbleOS is the easy one. OS recently opened by Google. But how are RePebble and Rebble related? Are they the same thing? Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble, or are they the same effort? Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble?
- will0 2y ago
  Rebble is the open source infra that has been keeping Pebbles alive since ~2016. See: rebble.io and https://github.com/pebble-dev https://github.com/pebble-dev (Disclaimer: I'm part of the team) RePebble is a new thing by Eric, the original founder of Pebble and is unrelated to Rebble. > Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble? Potentially! We have always talked about it, but some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plans are still being discussed. > Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble? Remains to be seen, but if I had to guess it's unlikely.
  - follower 2y ago
    > [...] some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plans are still being discussed. Feel free not to answer, but: does this imply Rebbele were aware of an impending Pebble OS source release but not... the other thing? If so, that seems... "unfortunate". :/ Also, btw, I really like the use of the phrase "user-respectful technology" in the Rebble post. And, rather unsurprisingly given one of my other recent comments[0], I am supportive of the fact that the Foundation's missions includes these aspects in particular: * "educating people about why these [little oasis of user-respectful technology] are important" * "using them as a platform to teach embedded systems" *insert additional supportive statement & well wishes here* :) ---- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856930 [1] [1] TooLong;Don'tRead. :)
- subarctic 2y ago
  There's also the Pebble watch which I believe was the thing that this all comes from originally? Just piecing this together from all the HN posts now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)
poisonborz 2y ago
> will accelerate our efforts to produce new hardware Don't do that. Don't give me hope...

381 points by will0 2y ago

https://github.com/google/pebble

dang 2y ago

Well now we have a conundrum - the top 3 posts on the frontpage are all about this! The submitted title of this post was "Google has open-sourced the pebble smartwatch operating system" but it actually points to https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html, so I've changed the title and moved the comments from here to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070, which has the Google announcement. The 3 threads are: We're bringing Pebble back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091 Google open-sources the Pebble OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070 The future of Rebble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 (<-- you are here)

msolberg 2y ago
DANG SAVE US hahaha
zamalek 2y ago
Let them them revvel in this glory IMO :), it's rare to see this kind of thing happen in the hardware space.
HaZeust 2y ago
Good exercise of your sequence priority philosophy, but I also think they all have their own right to be posted and discussed - this is exciting, and different angles and POVs can be brought to each thread. One is about Google's affairs with Pebble, one is about the community-grown Rebble, and one is about the founding team of the original Pebble itself.
- dang 2y ago
  I agree! though it's usually hard for the comments to stay partitioned that way.

TheMagicHorsey 2y ago

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

andyjohnson0 2y ago
What did it look like? All the ones I've seen have been pretty ugly - plastic cases, etc.
- TheMagicHorsey 2y ago
  It looked like exactly what you said. Plastic.
throwup238 2y ago
The original was Watchy: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/ https://watchy.sqfmi.com/ Not only can you run anything you want on it but it supports the Arduino IDE and Micropython. I assume all of the Alibaba ones are based off of Watchy.
- bigiain 2y ago
  I have one of this still in it's box unassembled. I like the idea. But I've been wearing mechanical watches for about a decade now...
Avamander 2y ago
The biggest issue is the software. It's mostly abysmal. The best effort I've seen so far has been InfiniTime for the PineTime. It's very difficult without full-time employees working on improving things.

MostlyStable 2y ago

Some commenters mentioned that the e-ink screen (and the accompanying battery life) was one reason why the Pebble is so beloved, which reminded me of the Basis Peak, which was primarily a health tracker watch with some (very limited) smart functionality (mostly just some notifications, if I recall), that also had an e-ink screen and a nearly 1 week battery life and had a sort of similar trajectory: Bought by Intel, then killed two years later after a battery related recall issue. It was, in my opinion, by far the best fitness tracker watch ever, and remains so to this day. Not so much because of it's actual features (which were relatively standard), but the software paradigm of simple yet effective exercise gamification that helped encourage exercise habit formation. 8 years later and I still miss it.

ClassyJacket 2y ago
Pebble had an LCD screen. It didn't use Eink at all. You can look this up, it was an LCD display manufactured by Sharp.
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  I never had one, but doing some quick googling, it looks like at least some models had an e-ink display. Certainly several commenters seemed to think it did.
  - will0 2y ago
    It was a transflective memory LCD, which Pebble marketed as "E-Paper" (not the same as E-Ink)
    - Groxx 2y ago
      An excellent one at that. It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit. I've got a Bangle.js 2 at the moment and while I mostly like it, the screen is nowhere near as nice. Transflective is still very obviously what I want in a watch though, even the best oleds don't even come close in visibility.

freedomben 2y ago

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

will0 2y ago
Rebble is the open source infra that has been keeping Pebbles alive since ~2016. See: rebble.io and https://github.com/pebble-dev https://github.com/pebble-dev (Disclaimer: I'm part of the team) RePebble is a new thing by Eric, the original founder of Pebble and is unrelated to Rebble. > Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble? Potentially! We have always talked about it, but some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plans are still being discussed. > Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble? Remains to be seen, but if I had to guess it's unlikely.
- follower 2y ago
  > [...] some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plans are still being discussed. Feel free not to answer, but: does this imply Rebbele were aware of an impending Pebble OS source release but not... the other thing? If so, that seems... "unfortunate". :/ Also, btw, I really like the use of the phrase "user-respectful technology" in the Rebble post. And, rather unsurprisingly given one of my other recent comments[0], I am supportive of the fact that the Foundation's missions includes these aspects in particular: * "educating people about why these [little oasis of user-respectful technology] are important" * "using them as a platform to teach embedded systems" *insert additional supportive statement & well wishes here* :) ---- [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856930 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856930 [1] [1] TooLong;Don'tRead. :)
subarctic 2y ago
There's also the Pebble watch which I believe was the thing that this all comes from originally? Just piecing this together from all the HN posts now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)

poisonborz 2y ago

> will accelerate our efforts to produce new hardware Don't do that. Don't give me hope...