Set your community up for success: A careful look at the Pebble 2025 revival.
Greetings folks,
I wanted to do a writeup on how the Pebble smartwatch crossed into my line of sight recently. I wanted to sing the praise for its community, their real go-to-work attitude they have around making and supporting new watch faces & apps. I wanted to approach this as a feedback blog post coming from a place of love, because like the Pebble community I too have a passion for creating, building & making microelectronics that do useful, lasting and impactful things. I also wanted to lament many of the creature comforts that I as a hobbyist developer have encountered when trying to align myself with the upcoming Pebble hackathon. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the tools found when developing back in 2010–2018 vs developing in the 2020’s. This blog brings into question how time fared against the challenges of a more modern developer trying to enter the Pebble ecosystem. Spoiler warning, it didn’t go as well as I had hoped for.
At the beginning of last year I wrote a blog post about my exploration of programming a badge for the ESP32 microprocessor stack. The tools here included Arduino for low level C++code [1] & SquareLine Studios’s all in one tool for UI development [2]. This experience lends itself to my other experience from 3 years back. This is when I was experimenting with NTP servers around distributed computing and atomic clock timekeeping. I also used smartwatches as a research project topic during my college studies of UI/UX design considerations. (If you have time for a primer on this subject, I highly recommend watching the entertaining works from Don Norman on useful design. His lessons are fun & apply as much back then as they do now. [3])
I originally wanted to make a convention badge that would have user adjustable text, font, pictures as well as interlink between other badges in the same space, share messages and work together. I’m glad I had assistance in accomplishing my goal with my friend and case designer Charles. We put together something that gave me the valuable hands-on experience needed in planning a software development & embedded hardware project. While there’s not a direct comparison to the Rebble ecosystem aside from the C language background to me it felt right to try and develop a watch face with Rebble as part of their new revival initiative. As part of launching a new watch in 2025 [4], the community is also hosting a hackathon for new apps and watch faces for new developers [5].
The resources for a Pebble developer in 2024 are as follows. I’m trying to be generous enough as to say that I gathered info for these from a variety of sources. These include the Rebble project’s website, their public discord server & archived software listed from over the years.
1st party stack:
· Google’s Pebble Smartwatch open-source code — https://github.com/google/Pebble made available recently through collaboration with the Rebble project.
· Pebble Appstore — https://apps.Rebble.io/en_US/watchapps — A Rebble project preserved Appstore. Contains all applications and resources including new watch faces added by the community to this day. (Must use devmode toggle to enable downloads)
· Rebble hackathon VM — https://Rebble.io/hackathon-002/vm/ — VM with the Pebble SDK preinstalled for developing, testing, emulating and working with Pebble smartwatch apps.
· Pebble SDK documentation — https://developer.Rebble.io/developer.Pebble.com/index.html — Preserved documentation under the Rebble project. It contains tutorials, example code, functions and parameters, guides. (Some content including Rocky.js DEPRECATED).
· CloudPebble — URL redirects to Fitbit- (DEPRECATED)
3rd party tools:
· GitHub — Git management tool, others are available, but I chose to use this one.
· Trello — Project management tool, others are available, but I chose to use this one.
· Figma — https://www.figma.com/design/ — SVG design tool, useful for UI & PNG/SVG design with the Pebble ecosystem.
· www.watchface-generator.de — (DEPRECATED)
· EasyFace for Pebble APK — (DEPRECATED)
There’s a key problem here which I’m hoping my readers will notice. Many of the tools are listed as deprecated with no equivalent or similar program to help fill the gap. This sort of thing happens as maintained software ages. As a project is less maintained over the years, it may fall prey to security issues or just fall out of attachment to a development entirely. The problem here is when you consider developer creature comforts; Recently deprecated items from 2025 are kind of profound.
Starting with CloudPebble, cloud abstraction tools vs local development can be seen in the ESP32 world as Arduino vs Platform IO. Platform IO is a cloud development platform for kits such as the ESP32 [6]. This tool is nice because it adds a lot of useful abstractions to avoid the need to know how to edit a config file. It’s not that I don’t like editing config files, but they can be time consuming and cumbersome for some issues. Another key tool which didn’t make the cut was the community project “watchface-generator.de”. This tool featured a simple abstraction and conversion tool for watch types and backgrounds. About 1 year ago the website went offline and because the creator felt their code was messy and poorly organized, they didn’t open source the tool. (I totally get that and haven’t released the source code to my own badge for this reason. Maybe this will be a reality check to one day clean up my badge’s code and publish it on GitHub appropriately.)
As an independent, we’re limited by our own means to create things. We need the help of others to drive innovative projects and success. My colleagues are highly encouraging of my growth and development and of course I know how to make tools from other tools. While this project is a sideline thing, I often keep thinking back to the same thing repeatedly: Tech projects can’t succeed without a team. Every time I visit a Maker Faire, I’m reminded of how great work comes from the shoulders of giants; Teams helping and encouraging each other to build success from the resources around them. Teaching new community members about new resources and gathering ways to innovate is part of the developer way. As a hobbyist developer new to any space, I would need a community or some form of support in tool abstraction to break work down into simpler parts in order to make something work. To those who can’t afford the luxury of time, the Rebble hackathon might not be what I thought I signed up for.
I want to also describe my bias & envy of the FOSS community. Their success in bringing projects together and supporting their lives through it. In truth, I feel alone for the moment as a developer because I’m off chasing another kind of success. Success can be defined by many ideas but making the most of what you have while supporting people around you is what I would describe as my current take on success. There’s something uniting about bonding with the people you have instead of lamenting about the people you lost or haven’t even met.
In a way it reminds me of the retro computing community, how a small group with the time and resources available to maintain systems continuing to age is coming about. Developers can and have fallen off because people don’t want to put in time to learn how to code for PDP-1 systems. This is the double edge sword of any hobbyist group; The hardcore elites will stay while the passively interested will move into other areas. I’ll argue that one of the few place in technology where this doesn’t end up happening is in retro gaming communities. Software developer kits for some retro consoles are around and abstracted in various ways. I have 2 key examples here.
The first is for enhancing experience. During the VR era, a program called 3dSEN [7] was created as a way to enhance NES games with support for individual sprite layer popout to create the illusion of a 3d game. (While it may have been inspired by the Nintendo 3d classics series [8], it went on from there.) The included studio tool helped less experienced programmers to create and isolate palates and sprite layers in order to create and distribute a 3d enhancement pack, and even some of these were put into the official emulation platform by the developer.
The 2nd example is one called NESFab which was released only a week ago. It is a fully featured language baked into its own SDK to allow developers to make new NES games [9]. It requires little in the way of knowledge to start but has a learning curve of the language itself. This might be most comparable to the current state of Pebble’s situation.
Handling even some of the basics like image and PNG conversion would be ideas, not to mention web connected services weren’t even made available in SquareLine but were abstracted better in Arduino. The NES community is 40 years old, while the pebble community is coming up on 10–12 years. As much as I want to ramble about this, it’s clear to me that the Pebble community is going through some growing pains. It may not be the right fit for a modern developer and may be at risk of being stuck as an “of its time” product, which doesn’t bode well for a new product set to release on the near horizon. I do truly fear this device will go from hipster cred to an elitist nightmare without a more modern toolset.
In an effort to not sound like an old man yelling at his cloud, I just wanted to try and map a future for my goal with the project, the scope and the directionality of my career at the moment relative to technology. I’m saddened that my background isn’t strong enough with the Pebble community’s roots to join in with the hackathon this year. I’m hoping that the new product will be a wonderful shot in the arm to the smartwatch ecosystem and bring joy and support from tech bloggers all around as it has been doing lately. I’m wary, but I’m optimistic for the future of Pebble once they realize where they should be headed. To all those participating, I wish you the best of luck and I hope to continue working and making small & useful gadgets!
Thanks for reading!
Resources:
[1] https://www.arduino.cc/en/software
[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/don_norman_3_ways_good_design_makes_you_happy
[7] https://www.geodstudio.net/
