We are excited to announce that the source code that powered Pebble smartwatches is now available for download.
This is part of an effort from Google to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016.
A quick look back
Pebble was initially launched through a very successful Kickstarter project. Pebble’s first Kickstarter was the single most funded at the time, and its successor Kickstarter for the Pebble Time repeated that feat – and remains the second most funded today! Over the course of four years, Pebble sold over two million smartwatches, cultivating a thriving community of thousands of developers who created over ten thousand Pebble apps and watchfaces.
In 2016, Fitbit acquired Pebble, including Pebble’s intellectual property. Later on, Fitbit itself was acquired by Google, taking the Pebble OS with it.
Despite the Pebble hardware and software support being discontinued eight years ago, Pebble still has thousands of dedicated fans.
What is being released
We are releasing most of the source code for the Pebble operating system. This repository contains the entire OS, which provides all the standard smartwatch functionality – notifications, media controls, fitness tracking, and support for custom apps and watchfaces – on tiny ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers. Built with FreeRTOS, it contains multiple modules for memory management, graphics, and timekeeping, as well as an extensive framework to load and run custom applications written in C, as well as in Javascript via the Jerryscript Javascript engine. The Pebble architecture allowed for a lightweight system delivering a rich user experience as well as a very long battery life.
It's important to note that some proprietary code was removed from this codebase, particularly for chipset support and the Bluetooth stack. This means the code being released contains all the build system files (using the waf build system), but it will not compile or link as released.
The path forward
From here, we are hoping this release will assist the dedicated community and volunteers from the Rebble project to carry forward the support for Pebble watches that users still love. For someone to build a new firmware update, there is a non-trivial amount of work to do in finding replacements for the pieces that were stripped out of this code, as well as updating this source code that has not been maintained for a few years.
By Matthieu Jeanson, Katharine Berry, and Liam McLoughlin
