Google open-sources the Pebble OS (opens in new tab)

Related ongoing threads:

We're bringing Pebble back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091 - Jan 2025 (1 comment)

The future of Rebble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 - Jan 2025 (3 comments)

Neat, I'm super excited! I've hoped the PineTime would be the new Pebble, but hasn't really materialized (though, it has gotten pretty good! despite being a little awkward).

I actually held off from buying a Pebble back in the day because the software wasn't open source and I was worried about getting dependent on a product I had no control over. (Yes, I see the vicious Tragedy of the Commons wrapped up there, but still gotta make the optimal choice for me). I'm beyond stoked to see this movement! And it being open source, I have no such qualms. If they are affordable enough, I'll probably be gifting these out on the regular so expect to sell at least a dozen or two :-D

Happy to hear about this. My mood tracker [0] for Pebble was the only one that has ever worked for me. Would love to have a comeback.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37221576

This is pretty cool. Have you ever thought about designing pebble to look more like a traditional watch but e-ink based?

Is the Small Android Phone project dead? :)

Oh this is awesome. Are you involved with repebble directly?

I still have my time round in a drawer somewhere. I moved to a galaxy watch, which is great for being able to play Spotify offline, GPS etc, but like all modern smart watches is terrible for bloat and a screen that's responsible for like 70% of the power draw.

It's really disheartening that the average consumer only sees the shiny oled and slick animations and doesn't think at all about the inconvenience of charging at least once a day...

the site asks if you want a new pebble and if you click "no" you're redirected to apple watch website LMAO

Which Pebble are you bringing back? I ask because Pebble 2 was the sweet spot for me with a heart rate monitor but the heart rate monitor is not in this repo.

I love what you're doing but the design of the pebble turns me off. Thoughts on making a sleek design that actually looks like a pebble?

I did wear my Pebble until it died, and then never found another smart watch worth it for me. Will keep an eye on this for sure.

Thanks! I don’t think I’ll ever go back from my Apple Watch, but pebble does still hold a soft spot in my heart.

There is apparently huge amounts of goodwill for Pebble!

But. Isn’t most of the value of a codebase like this not the code itself, but all the knowledge of the people who worked on it day to day? Where are they?

It’s really intriguing. People who have a lot of goodwill towards Pebble BELIEVE the source code is valuable. That doesn’t mean that it is.

Oh this is awesome news. The Pebble was by far the best smartwatch I've ever used. No quirks, just always reliable. The hard work shone through with how quirk free it was.

Yep, that's the kind of thing I would have expected "don't be evil" Google from 20 years ago to do. All is not lost.

Yes and no. They did buy it and just let it die. They were so far ahead of the competition at the time.

Looking though that list:

    All of the system fonts

Presumably the source included the TTF files from which the rasterized bitmap resources were automatically generated. Including the pre-rasterized bitmaps extracted from a previous release should not be a problem as typefaces and bitmap fonts are not subject to copyright in the US, vs vector font files which are eligible for copyright as computer programs.

    The Bluetooth stack, except for a stub that will function in an emulator

This seems unfortunate, and looks to be one of the most critical gaps in the source release.

    The STM peripheral library

You can get this from ST no problem, although it is only licensed for use on STM devices.

    The voice codec

It should be feasible enough to replace this.

    ARM CMSIS

The old versions with non-free licenses are still available from ARM or ST, and the recent versions are Apache licensed (but some porting of code might be required to use to newer versions).

    For the Pebble 2 HR, the heart rate monitor driver

This was probably based on sample code from the vendor which could be replaced.

> - ARM CMSIS

It's worth noting that CMSIS itself is open source but some of the drivers for this hardware probably were not.

I remember reading that the Bluetooth stack was one of the main differentiators for Pebble at the time due to its reliability, shame it's not included here.

That's what happens when you don't have to play by the rules of reality. Googles monopoly allows them to act like this. It's unfair and generally bad for everyone involved. Thankfully it seems that that era is finally going to end

Inbox is the one that still stings for me. I'm paying some silly amount for Superhuman which is almost there, but.. nothing is as good as Inbox was.

In case anyone would like a more complete list of products Google has killed, here's a handy website to mourn your favorite dead product:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

RIP Google Wave... I had such high hopes when it was first released... :'(

Eh, I take a much more "gloves off" approach to this mentality. If you bought an Airport thinking that it would be your forever router, you're a moron. Same goes for buying an eero, or Google Home, or even an iPad at this point. You don't own this hardware, you control nothing about it. The idea that products live forever is a bedtime story we tell ourselves, an utter fairytale of the software industry.

Everyone kills software products. The problem is our attitude of entitlement towards things we sign an EULA to use. You "own" TikTok on the App Store? Pssh, please. You don't even own the software runtime you use TikTok with.

then, after the damage is done, they throw some scraps to the plebs and the comment section is full of thank yous to the monopolist

You can still get watches which use the same MIP display technology as the Pebble and run similar "smart-ish" software with very long battery life. They tend to be marketed more as fitness/sports watches rather than smartwatches though.

Every Pebble model used an LCD display. It being epaper has to be one of the most pervasive myths in tech history. It was a low powered, reflective LCD, so it did improve on other LCDs in those areas somewhat, but it wasn't eink technology.

Alloca is allocations on the stack, seems the kernel might be stack based, but the os itself has it's own implementation of malloc. Which is heap based. https://github.com/google/pebble/blob/main/src/libos/include...

I'm also seeing references to rtos as the true underlying os though.

It's one of the original smart watches. What really sets it apart from modern ones is the e-ink display and dead simple interface (just a few buttons, no touchscreen). This simplicity means that it continues to do what it does well and doesn't really feel like it has aged badly. Certainly I would rather wear a pebble than a gen 1 Samsung watch or moto360.

It's a delightful bit of kit that was sadly abandoned by owner and it's nice that they are open-sourcing a dead product instead of just leaving it to rot like so many other electronics are.

People really like their Pebble watches, and this will help keep them alive into the future. In some future, we may see new hardware produced that could use some derivative of the resulting operating system.

Given the original Pebble folks are using this to spin up a re-launch ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845185 ), my guess is the Pebble folks just know someone on the inside at Google who managed to get the lawyers to sign off on it.

google isn't doing anything with it, its not really a competitor to androidwear, and it probably has enough pebble nerd fans within google itself to push for it.

Hardware is hard to almost impossible as a sustainable business as a small company unless there is a thriving ODM market and you can just use your own software.

At least the controller firmware!

you still will be! In a few!

I see a bunch of demo\test apps here https://github.com/google/pebble/tree/main/src/apps

Snowy link works for me now

Try that URL again :)

Well, better would have been investing in it and making it better. At least they didn't produce some awful spy on you thing that had nothing to do with p and called it pebble

I’ve never heard that RTOSs are the future in general. With that said, there are a lot of great RTOS options out there today.

1) PREEMPT_RT recently brought realtime capability to mainline Linux[0].

2) Amazon open sourced the safety-certified ThreadX[1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PREEMPT_RT

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThreadX

TL;DR: No. Maybe? Depends.

It's probably reasonable to make a distinction between "Real Time" desktop/server OS (on CPUs) vs "Real Time" embedded hardware OS (on MCUs).

(Even aside from any hard-/soft- real time distinction.)

On the embedded side, in addition to FreeRTOS (upon which Pebble OS is built), I'm aware of others with reasonably high profile such as:

* Zephyr (Linux Foundation, C): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(operating_system)

* NuttX (Apache Software Foundation, C & C++): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuttX

In addition, there's also some "up & coming" Rust language projects which fall somewhere along the "framework" to "OS" spectrum (in part, via https://arewertosyet.com):

* Tock: https://github.com/tock/tock

* Embassy: https://github.com/embassy-rs/embassy

* Hubris: https://hubris.oxide.computer

On the desktop side, I seem to recall in the past, OS such as BeOS & QNX have been presented as a possible future for real time desktop OS that hasn't arrived.

As someone else already mentioned, PREEMPT_RT being merged for Linux is a recent development somewhat in this space which could have impact on both desktop & "embedded" situations but suitability varies dependent on, say, whether you're wanting to use it for audio production versus controlling some 10 tonne robot operating next to humans.

Hope this at least goes some way to answering your question. :)

This case looks okay. It's converting a double to an int64_t and then back to double for comparison. It doesn't really suffer from the typical reason why floating point comparison is frowned upon, such as catastrophic cancellation.

I've once optimized a function to be faster, and in a unit test asserted that the old slower version gives exactly the same floating point answer as the new optimized version. It's doable in some cases.

I've only done a little bit of arduino programming, but for that you had to import a whole library for floating point math which took a huge amount of space, and many chips didn't even have hardware support for it.

Read it and educate yourself. Feed it to an LLM for training data. Put it back together with the binary bits from an existing build.

I do wonder how they successfully justified this to the higher ups. If anything, I would like to learn from them so I can better justify the things I want to do..

From my experience with working there, it wasn't actually that hard to advocate and get things open sourced that my team worked on after Google made the decision to kill it. (ndash video player stuff that was being done by the team I was on in Fiber @ Google Waterloo). Management is on the whole open to these things, and Google -- unlike other companies I've been at -- has an official process for this, and it feels on the whole fair.

For all the sins that Google commits, they're generally decent about the whole open source community. There's things they rely on they should be providing funding for, certainly. But they're good about letting their people contribute, and often good about opening things up to the outside world.

Of course this project is bigger and more complicated, and clearly had tendrils into a lot of other things, so...

I think it's perfectly reasonable to celebrate this action and the individuals who championed it while also being cynical of the big tech orgs that resist changes like this for the reasons described.

The only financial benefit for Google that I could guess would be to drive complement prices to zero (assuming some Pebble refresh is successful), as part of competition against Apple watch.

For visibility (via comment by 1337shadow @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848245):

----

> Instead, we took a more direct route - I asked friends at Google (which bought Fitbit, which had bought Pebble’s IP) if they could open source PebbleOS. They said yes! Over the last year, a team inside Google (including some amazing ex-Pebblers turned Googlers) has been working on this. And today is the day - the source code for PebbleOS is now available at github.com/google/pebble (see their blog post).

https://ericmigi.com/blog/why-were-bringing-pebble-back

----

Which is ironic because Google needs to improve their reputation about sunsetting early. This is one of the main arguments for why many businesses for why they do not employ their alternatives

IIRC based on my experience open sourcing some code for a paper, I think you just need to get VP approval, which is probably not that hard if you are a well respected L6/7 in your org.

They could consider open source everything you have killed ( https://killedbygoogle.com ) over the years.

May be the whole design and development process from the start should be everything they do could one day be open sourced. So be aware what you do and what you comment.

Sounds like a horrible place to work.

(That said, I offer my gratitude for the perseverance it took to get this done)

I mean, Google develops three other open source operating systems and is a major contributor to other operating systems, as well from other vast open projects like Chromium. It's not as if open-sourcing an operating system is even slightly out of character for Google.

Maybe...the cynic in me says that someone feels this needs to be preserved because it will become another Google relic in favor of something newer, or more shiny. Or likely something written in Go...just a guess on my part...