- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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!
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I’d feel liked Id buy out of nostalgia and then be disappointed. Pebble was the pioneer that got bought out. Typical
I dunno. I keep remembering what my old Pebble did, and how well it did, and nothing more… And yep, I want it back.
Basically, a dumb watch, with an HR monitor, accelerometer, and could sync that data to my phone app.
Its API let me do cool things like pause/unpause my music while running, which was nice. But, it required the apps to be have an API for doing so.
Battery? The thing went an entire week between charges.
I vaguely remember it being amazing but again vaguely remember it. I know it was my 1st smartwatch though!!
I disagree with calling it “dumb”. it was perfect for it’s niche. I want a watch to show the time, basic notifications, media control… not send an email.
Pebble always on screen and long battery life was perfect for a wearable. all other smartwatches are basically miniaturized phones that do way too much in a screen that can’t handle it. If something is easier to do on the phone, it does not need to work on a smartwatch.
Hopefully the new pebbles are good, I am worried that the new one’s touch screen will make a touch based UI, which suck on tiny screens,
I get baited every time :( thinking “Ah! Finally a watch I can buy!” Then I, again, see the 30 day warranty (that would be illegal in my country) and remember that this is not a good buy for me. Good luck to all buyers.
is 30 days a red flag?
Some countries have more consumer protections than the US does, and consumers from there are wary of the lack of assurances a lot of us products have.
To them, it’s like being told you have to pay for your food at the restaurant even if they mess up your order and you don’t get to eat it. It doesn’t matter that the waiter probably isn’t going to drop your food on the floor, throw it away and then give you a bill: the fact that they could makes you not want to go there.
Likewise, your watch will almost certainly not break via factory defect after more than a month, but the expectation is that if they sell you something it’ll either last the expected lifetime or be suitably replaced or refunded on failure.
We’re used to our particular blend of capitalist hellscape, so a company saying they’ll replace things if they’re obviously broken the moment you buy it, but beyond than you’re out of luck just seems normal. It’s on us to make sure they don’t mail us subtly damaged microelectronics and tiny lithium bombs.
Warranty is nothing I care about. In Germany it is perfectly legal (called “Garantie”), but we habe laws ensuring 2 year period called “Gewährleistung” which is automtically included
Either you are misunderstanding something or I am. I don’t think Gewährleistung applies here because it is not sold to the German market but instead you import it from the American market.
pebble watch now 100% on my consideration list. maybe i will finally get a smartwatch?
what do you guys find it useful for?
I have a Pebble Time and when the app stopped working a Garmin Fenix.
I use my smart watch predominantly for Text notifications, call screening and music control.
In the past this was to extend my phone to last more than a day. But now it’s so I don’t need to dig up my phone when I get a notification or call. Great for monitoring things when you are driving or walking.
The biggest benefits of these devices is the insane battery life. Like a Garmin the battery is in weeks not hours. So charging is infrequent unlike the phone.
Pebble though is still the best in this field since their watches use epaper for their displays. So it actually works as a watch. And their devices are application focused, so if it doesn’t come with a timer, you can always download one.
Garmin watches are good, but their move to OLED pushed me away from buying another. And their locked down system makes me concerned with its future as a smart watch. As a sport and activity tracker it’s unrivalled. But I will buy a new pebble before another Garmin.
You got a garmin fenix for text notifications? Wild stuff
It was very very onsale, and at the time I was bouldering so I wanted to track it.
Currently using it as a swim watch and if I get a new pebble, I will still be using it as my exercise computer.
Man I wish I could get a fenix very very on sale
Usually their out going ones are like half off during sales. Currently the 7 is at half off $630 CAD. Which I think is what I paid for my 6 and is the same price as the Forerunner… onsale.
That said the 7 is the newest fenix id buy now that Garmin is ditching the MIPs display for AMOLED.
Really hate that we are moving away from front lit MIPs displays. Only the Enduro has it and it’s not cheap.
I’m on day 9 with over 40% battery left and that’s with dealing with over 300 notifications a day.
It’s stupid light, barely notice it’s there.
I love my pebble, I missed them while they were gone - no other smartwatch comes close. I’m glad they’re back.
But why 300 notifications per day? Can you not turn them off?
Did you try the Bangle.js? I’m just curious because of your comment about having no peer. I own every model of Pebble, including þe disaster þat is þe Round, and when my Time Steel battery finally degraded to unacceptable levels I got a Bangle.js 2, and to my surprise I discovered I þink it’s even better þan þe Pebble.
Þey’re pretty close, but I’m curious why you feel Pebble has no competition, since þe Bangle changed my mind about þat.
- Tasker profiles
- Music Boss to use gesture control and control audiobooks and music
- Tasker Profiles
- Call and text info
- Tasker profiles
- Google map directions
Cool, but have you thought about using it for Tasker profiles?
Can’t, he’s too busy with Tasker profiles.
He’s busy trying to figure out how to set up Tasker profiles using Tasker profiles
anything interesting you use tasker for?
Tasker can do pretty much anything, so most things are based around need and novelty. I have a gps profile with a view/store/retrieve car location for parking lots, a profile to send my location via text, pretyped text messages to my wife, light control for my phone, photo control for my phone, find my phone by audio file and volume, music playlists, a stupid script that takes my feelings over the day on a 1 to 10 scale and based on the avg at the end of the day plays a particular song to meet that mood, a password generator that stores and kinda encrypts via a Caesarian style translation to a txt file, and then decrypts and retrieves the password (I still manualy edit the text to put in titles for the passwords) Most of my tasker scripts are already automated so there isn’t as much need for manual control.
It’s all good, but it’s closed source :(
How does it compare to the built-in Samsung modes and routines?
It’s WAY more capable than that.
You can automate anything you can think of.
It can even use root!That’s good to know. Thank you. I’ll have a good look
Its sadly properitary :(
Iddon’t have a pebble watch but I find my smartwatch useful for reducing my screen time. when I get a notification, I look at my watch and don’t do anything else if it is not important, doesn’t require immediate answer. When I don’t have my watch, I look at my phone to see the notification, and check other stuff while I have my phone, like Instagram end Lemmy, and a single notification takes 20 minutes of my life.
Exercise tracking!
battery life, the quirky watch faces, notifications and controlling my music while on the run. GadgetBridge supports it so you don’t depend on their apps. the pebble 2 models have an issue with the buttons. pebble time is fine. also, don’t use them in water.
i like my smartwatch bc it shows time, i can pay quickly, and it vibrates when i get a notification or call. (the vibration is more noticable then the one my phone makes and i dislike loud noises)
note: i have a samsung, not a pebble
If the Android app is fully open source, then it should be made available in f-droid
Apparently the packaging requirements for F-Droid are more challenging than just “must be open source” and aren’t for everybody.
https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/
The “no Google Play services” alone are a non starter for many apps. My preferred messenger, Signal, is plenty open source and runs its own notification daemon, but cannot be found on F-Droid. I have to get it via Obtainium instead.
I think Mastodon and Element use Google’s push notification service.
I have microG installed, and both apps show up as registered for cloud messaging.
Element on fdroid uses ntfy push notifications or background sync.
Ah, you are right, I installed Element from the Google store (using Aurora).
But Mastodon is from F-Droid and it uses Google notification service, I just checked.
“No Google Play services” falls under “app must be FOSS”. The average publicly developed open source app should not have much trouble getting into F-Droid if the developer wants to. Google Play services consists of several components, one of which is a proprietary library included in apps using it. If your app includes proprietary code, it is not FOSS.
If Signal decided a build without proprietary blobs isn’t worth it, they’re not getting into F-Droid. Forks of Signal exist that remove the Google Play services build requirement, those are in F-Droid.
Forks of Signal exist that remove the Google Play services build requirement, those are in F-Droid.
Like Molly. I use it and it’s great. I’m using the FOSS version.
You can even selfhost the push server.
Sorry but F-Droid allows many apps that use “undesirable” networks and services but for no reason that I can see snuffs out the one wholly supported notification system on literally all android devices. Its plug and play. Its got no place in the “Free” part of FOSS but it’s still intentionally more challenging to get around.
The difference is what code runs on your device. If proprietary libraries are included, F-Droid won’t build it, and it’s not allowed in their repository. There’s a lot to say about whether a FOSS app that relies on proprietary network services is truly “free”, there’s no arguing that an app with proprietary code blobs is “free”.
Take for example an app like NewPipe. The application itself doesn’t include proprietary code, but it contacts YouTube, a proprietary Google service. With the app itself being open source, you can tell exactly what it is doing on your device, and what information is sent over the network. Comparing that to something like Signal, which includes proprietary Google libraries, you’d have to decompile and reverse engineer it to try and figure out what it’s doing.
If you have a FOSS library that interacts with Google Play Services or microG to enable FCM, it would (probably) be allowed on F-Droid. (I’m not on their team, I can’t make a definitive statement about this).
I tried to find the binary blobs in Signal for android but it looks like a Kotlin app to me. Maybe these were there at one point but were removed later, who knows.
Come to think of it I’m surprised that we can say “no Google play services” but in the same breath support MicroG as if the client apps have anything to do with which version of Play Services they support.
Signal […] cannot be found on F-Droid. I have to get it via Obtainium instead.
You can get Molly on F-Droid. It’s a soft fork that iimplements UnifiedPush, among other things.
In addition to this, Signal can be downloaded from their own website and has a self update mechanism. It also does not depend on google play services (which I don’t have on my android phone)
Signal, the messenger that lags code sumps for a year so they can get a leg up with insider knowledge of their own cryptocurrency?
Ooh… can I print my next smartwatch?
Depends, can you print your own PCBs and microchips?
can you print your own PCBs
As long as its only dual layer, no problem
and microchips
No 😢
They released all the info, including pcb cads, sensor info, etc.
Yes but are you physically equipped to print that sort of stuff was the question
Probably could print the shell and buttons, would be quite difficult to print the wristband, and the screen, PCB, storage and battery would all have to be commodity components. Doable though.
There are case stls available for the Pebble 2, not sure about the rest (P2s were the most… fragile).
pebble
When you’re right, you’re right
And you? You’re always right.
Cool! I’ve been that interested in smartwatches but I’m interested in this!
Can someone explain this to me. When you setup pebble on this new open source app, does the app connect to the internet? Who controls those servers? Is it rebble or this company LLC that Eric created? Who is server admin?
It is open sourcing the repebble app here: https://repebble.com/app
Looking through the code, most calls go to repebble.com, rebble.com and rebble.io domains. Most of it seems to be for login, firmware downloads, settings synchronization, weather forecasts and language packs.
There are also some calls to memfault.com for crash analytics.
Most of it seems pretty innocent. If you don’t like this app you can also use Gadgetbridge as an alternative.
With a quick look through the code I can see calls are being made to rebble.io and repebble.com. From there you can whois the domains.
Remind me of the recent source ownership issue? I thought there was a “thanks for all the community work over a decade and we want to participate; oops now we own it” story.
Covered here you choose to look into it more if you want.
I finally got my Duo 2, and while my old OG still lasts 3 days on a battery I figured time to give it rest.
So far its been great, except that I can’t connect to gadgetbridge anymore. I uninstalled the Core pebble app and instead popped MicroPebble on my phone due to not exactly liking where Core was heading, so I’m glad they’re finally pivoting.
I waited until I got my duo whilst my Steel was on a 2 day battery cycle. As soon as I got the watch it dropped to 16 hours. I finally replaced the battery, to find that I really needed a new zebra strip, too. 12 days later I got a new strip and my Steel is running for 7 days again. I use Mpebble for now, as to my knowledge Cobble doesn’t support many 3rd party apps like Tasker yet (I haven’t tried in a couple of weeks)
They honestly lost me with the fitness platform they were developing with the hardware they tried launching before they got bought by Fitbit.
I’m too baked into my Apple Watch to use a Pebble today. I don’t have any of my old watches. I would not mind a circular Apple Watch. I loved the Pebble Round.
The founder explains in this blog post about the original failure of pebble, and why pebble shouldn’t have focused on fitness.
They’re coming back as a tool/toy for the enthusiasts who want to tinker.
This is amazing. Very interested in picking one up
I grabbed a banglejs a while back for cheap embedded funzies, and it’s really stellar as a hackable companion device that you don’t use much, or at least in fairly passive or niche ways. Espruino is really cool though, and that’s the heart of the project.
I wonder how this compares as a higher-end (maybe only other?) FOSS watch, mostly on the battery/power ratio. I actually don’t know much about the pebble design.
I’ve had Pebble watches for probably 14 years now? Let me know what you want to know.
I will say that I’ve had Garmin, Pixel, Samsung, and Fitbits and still prefer Pebble above all.
Is there a model with GPS and a SIM?
It doesn’t look like it. They had to make compromises on what to include, otherwise they’d end up with smartwatch that’s larger than a phone.
With it being 100% open source, it should be easy* for someone to add these features.
\*
“We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”
The Programmers’ Credo
pebble sucks, all my niggers use casio.
