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Eric Migicovsky wants to ensure Pebble can't be killed again, and DIYers benefit most:
Pebble, the e-ink smartwatch with a tumultuous history, is making a move sure to please the DIY enthusiasts that make up the bulk of its fans: Its entire software stack is now fully open source, and key hardware design files are available too.
Pebble creator Eric Migicovsky announced the move on Monday in a blog post and video detailing the changes his reborn Pebble watchmaking firm has undertaken, and they're considerable.
For those unfamiliar with the saga of Pebble, the budget e-ink smartwatches are Migicovsky's brainchild, and first became widely available in 2013. Color models came later, but by 2016 the company had been acquired by Fitbit, which canned hardware sales and put the Pebble software ecosystem out to pasture. Support for the devices disappeared with the Fitbit acquisition too, leaving independent tinkerers operating under the name Rebble to take up support for the devices of their own accord.
Fitbit was later acquired by Google, which open sourced Pebble's operating system in January 2025. Migicovsky launched a new company, Core Devices, in March, with plans to release two new Pebble watches. Google's trademark on the Pebble brand had expired, Migicovsky told us, and he now owns it under a new filing.
First off, all the electrical and mechanical schematics for Pebble's one currently available device, the black-and-white Pebble 2 Duo, are now available on Github for anyone to tinker with or to build their own Pebble 2 Duo.
The schematics for the Core Devices' other new watch, the yet-to-be-released Pebble Time 2, aren't available on Github, naturally. That device is going to begin shipping sometime early next year, Migicovsky said in his blog post, but he told us in an email that he hasn't decided whether to publish the schematics for that device yet.
Things are getting just as open on the software side, with the entirety of PebbleOS and the mobile apps used to push notifications and manage the device on iOS and Android both now available on Github for your own compilation and modification purposes, joining the Pebble SDK and other dev tools in open source software land.
Migicovsky noted in his video that he hopes the opening of PebbleOS to anyone who wants to tinker with it will lead to a new generation of products, both watches and beyond.
"I am excited that there may be people crazy enough to take Pebble OS and make it work in other products or other watches," Migicovsky said.
[...] Later this week, once Google and Apple approve the change, the Pebble mobile apps will have multiple app feeds that users can subscribe to. Additionally, anyone can create their own feed, Migicovsky explained. Core is also opening its own Pebble Appstore feed that will be packed up to Archive.org daily, Migicovsky added.
"This makes us not reliant on our servers, and at any point if our servers were to disappear you could download a copy of that, stand up your own Pebble app store feed, and continue to use it," the Pebble creator said. "We hope this sets a standard for openness. We encourage all app store feeds to publish a freely and publicly available archive of all the apps on their feed."
Monetization features are also being added to the Pebble app so that developers can make money off their creations, Migicovsky explained.
Whether this new model of openness will be enough to take Pebble from being a footnote in the wearable space now dominated by Apple, Samsung and others is far from a sure thing, but hey: for those that want more control over their device, you can't get better than this new generation of entirely open source hardware and software.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Monday December 01, @06:26PM (3 children)
https://github.com/coredevices/hardware [github.com]
Could be interesting. Might take a look. Quick look, can't find a simple BOM for the project. But I might have missed it. I guess in that regard the main concern if you want to build one is that one or a few of the components are basically unobtainium which might perhaps not now but some years down the line sort of kill the entire thing. Still for now it's probably all good. It has schematics, kicad files, stl files for printing the housing etc.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday December 01, @07:19PM (2 children)
One phone only has STL files for home printing.
The other has schematics with Seeed studios logos... which led me down an interesting rabbit hole to https://wiki.seeedstudio.com/RePhone/ [seeedstudio.com]
There doesn't seem to be a lot of centralized explanation of the history of pebble and seeeed, but it looks like it could be an interesting story.
Most "hardware kit smart watches" cost more than a commercial smart watch. I'd rather root a Samsung than build my own custom hardware. Displays are better on commercial products.
One problem with smartphones is the market is melting up, hundreds of dollars for dozens of sensors none of which I'm interested in. I mostly use my little fitness band thingie to see and disregard incoming legacy voice calls, and see if I need to immediately respond to an incoming text, and occasionally use the audio integration to pause what I'm listening to. I liked the "on wrist wake up vibrator" but now I just use my phone in the rare event of needing a wakeup. All the sensors offered are uninteresting to me and I don't look at them after initial purchase, given some years (decade?) of experience. I like my $30 Xiaomi that does the above. I know the Chinese Communist party has access to it, but it has less ability to negatively influence my life than a Californian fitbit which is also made in China anyway, so I may as well get the cheap one.
Fitbits were/are engineered to rapidly break anyway, I've been thru that... If I'm going to buy something disposable and not use 99% of its features I may as well buy the cheap one.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday December 02, @05:37PM
I've seen basic smart watches for as low as $15 on eBay. You're definitely not going to outdo that if one of those will do what you need. There's also projects like Ollee that can add some smart features to specific Casio watch models. The one issue I see with that is that there's no wireless charging. Chargeable button cells do exist and putting the watch on the charger a couple times a year would be preferable to having to open up the watch to replace the battery.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 03, @11:20AM
The PineTime is $27, whether it's a dev kit that is unsealed and you can do hardware hacking on or the semi-production module that you can flash with customised firmware only.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by stormwyrm on Wednesday December 03, @11:17AM
Pine64 also has the PineTime [pine64.org], which is also open source and open hardware, in as far as any device based on modern silicon can be said to be such. In addition to the regular PineTime model that you can do firmware customisation up to a certain level they also have a dev kit that is unsealed and allows deeper work at the lowest hardware levels for embedded system developers. I wonder if you can get PebbleOS running on this thing too.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.