Hacker News Reader

Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

>>I have to say I'm really disappointed and this is a huge blow to people that invest in startups offering hardware.

Buyers need to start demanding Open Source Software and Open Hardware...

With out that, you will always be screwed

Or at least treat any kind of cloud integration as a big negative. Without cloud dependence, the devices can always be hacked and made to work again until hardware dies.

One of the main reasons I went with the Pebble over other options was that I could use sleep tracking with it via a 3rd party app, without any need for their cloud. Sleep as Android has your back there. It's the only sleep tracking tool I like because it's able to keep your data locally on your phone or sync'd via a few mechanisms.

As for the step tracking... yeah, not sure.

Your device will keep working yet, but what if you switch phones/tablets? Now you need to setup a new device with the watch and...oh wait... Pebble re-downloads and re-installs all the apps. If their app/servers go away, now we'll be looking up hack people wrote on github to get our devices working again.

Yeah, fortunately TiBu can backup both the Pebble app and the Bluetooth pairing. But that's basically next, modified firmwares already exist I believe, so I don't think it's unreasonable to think that if we need to use those and sideload apps we'll be able to.

I'm fairly sure that I could crack the pebble apk myself to remove the authentication stuff at the beginning if it's needed. Backing up all the apps and stuff before it's gone might be the bigger worry here.

Backup is already underway, Reddit folks stepped up to the challenge.

I don't think PBW format has any magic in it that could enforce cloud dependency.

Yeah, from what I saw with the customized firmwares it looked fairly open to tinkering.

I'll have to check out what's going on with the pebble community over there. Might be interesting to get as much reverse engineered as possible before everything goes belly up.

Shenzhen is booming because of Open Source hardware. It's amazing. They realized that IP is garbage and only holds back everyone.

Interesting. Where can I read more about this?

A non-comprehensive, short list of what I could find from a couple of minutes of Googling around:

[1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4751

[2] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

[3] http://qz.com/771727/chinas-factories-in-shenzhen-can-copy-p...

I watched this series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c&list=PLPoleY2BUv...

>>Buyers need to start demanding Open Source Software and Open Hardware...

Exactly

Point me to an F/OSS and Open Hardware version and I'm there. Seriously, I'm always backing those sorts of devices over proprietary ones every chance I get - though it's rare as heck.

Pretty sure this is still under active development, but it's supposed to be a completely open fitness tracker: http://openhealth.wemaketotem.org/

There's also the FOSS smart watch OS Asteroid OS: http://asteroidos.org/

Thanks! Not sure that the tracker is what I'm looking for (or I'd be into the fitbit move), but Asteroid looks intriguing. I'm following both now.

Appreciate the tip!

Then Open Source Software needs to get better.

It is already very good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com