The future of Rebble | Hacker News Reader

The future of Rebble

rebble.io

381 pointswill027 comments

https://github.com/google/pebble

Some commenters mentioned that the e-ink screen (and the accompanying battery life) was one reason why the Pebble is so beloved, which reminded me of the Basis Peak, which was primarily a health tracker watch with some (very limited) smart functionality (mostly just some notifications, if I recall), that also had an e-ink screen and a nearly 1 week battery life and had a sort of similar trajectory:

Bought by Intel, then killed two years later after a battery related recall issue.

It was, in my opinion, by far the best fitness tracker watch ever, and remains so to this day. Not so much because of it's actual features (which were relatively standard), but the software paradigm of simple yet effective exercise gamification that helped encourage exercise habit formation. 8 years later and I still miss it.

Pebble had an LCD screen. It didn't use Eink at all. You can look this up, it was an LCD display manufactured by Sharp.

I never had one, but doing some quick googling, it looks like at least some models had an e-ink display. Certainly several commenters seemed to think it did.

It was a transflective memory LCD, which Pebble marketed as "E-Paper" (not the same as E-Ink)

An excellent one at that. It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit.

I've got a Bangle.js 2 at the moment and while I mostly like it, the screen is nowhere near as nice. Transflective is still very obviously what I want in a watch though, even the best oleds don't even come close in visibility.

> It boggles my mind that others didn't follow suit.

Most fitness smartwatches (Garmin, Coros, Wahoo) used the same display technology for years, called it MIP displays. Nowadays they are switching to OLEDs.

https://garminrumors.com/amoled-vs-mip-in-garmin-devices-a-d...

Somewhat!

The vast majority I've seen are black and white, with a color layer on top that is disabled when in "low power / sunlight readable" modes. And many of the smartwatch-focused devices (rather than Garmin's super pricey and gigantic "hiking for days without a phone so it solar charges and has gps and..." watches) only use OLED, even if the brand has MIP screens in some other product lines.

I haven't seen anything even close to what pebble's color watches did. Banglejs is by far the closest, with 6 colors and a much more muted screen in general.

No, it had an "epaper" display that visually looked a lot like eink but was a different technology

A transflective LCD[0] though (that they call "e-paper"), which, in user-facing terms, is similar to e-ink.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transflective_liquid-crystal_d...

Well now, users would notice if the screen has to constantly flicker like their Kindle instead of looking like a colour Casio screen. Meaningful user-facing distinction there.

Ah, that's fair enough. I was thinking of the positive e-ink-like properties, but this is a good point. "e-paper" in fact makes more sense here.

Well now we have a conundrum - the top 3 posts on the frontpage are all about this!

The submitted title of this post was "Google has open-sourced the pebble smartwatch operating system" but it actually points to https://rebble.io/2025/01/27/the-future-of-rebble.html, so I've changed the title and moved the comments from here to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070, which has the Google announcement.

The 3 threads are:

We're bringing Pebble back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845091

Google open-sources the Pebble OS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845070

The future of Rebble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845017 (<-- you are here)

DANG SAVE US hahaha

Let them them revvel in this glory IMO :), it's rare to see this kind of thing happen in the hardware space.

Good exercise of your sequence priority philosophy, but I also think they all have their own right to be posted and discussed - this is exciting, and different angles and POVs can be brought to each thread. One is about Google's affairs with Pebble, one is about the community-grown Rebble, and one is about the founding team of the original Pebble itself.

I agree! though it's usually hard for the comments to stay partitioned that way.

I'm a little confused at the moving pieces here. We have RePebble, Rebble, and PebbleOS. PebbleOS is the easy one. OS recently opened by Google.

But how are RePebble and Rebble related? Are they the same thing? Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble, or are they the same effort? Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble?

Rebble is the open source infra that has been keeping Pebbles alive since ~2016. See: rebble.io and https://github.com/pebble-dev

(Disclaimer: I'm part of the team)

RePebble is a new thing by Eric, the original founder of Pebble and is unrelated to Rebble.

> Is Rebble making hardware as well as RePebble?

Potentially! We have always talked about it, but some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plans are still being discussed.

> Is RePebble also open source and community owned like Rebble?

Remains to be seen, but if I had to guess it's unlikely.

> [...] some of the announcements today have thrown us for a loop so plans are still being discussed.

Feel free not to answer, but: does this imply Rebbele were aware of an impending Pebble OS source release but not... the other thing?

If so, that seems... "unfortunate". :/

Also, btw, I really like the use of the phrase "user-respectful technology" in the Rebble post.

And, rather unsurprisingly given one of my other recent comments[0], I am supportive of the fact that the Foundation's missions includes these aspects in particular:

* "educating people about why these [little oasis of user-respectful technology] are important"

* "using them as a platform to teach embedded systems"

*insert additional supportive statement & well wishes here* :)

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[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856930 [1]

[1] TooLong;Don'tRead. :)

There's also the Pebble watch which I believe was the thing that this all comes from originally? Just piecing this together from all the HN posts now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_(watch)

I'm curious if anyone has tried one of the newer e-ink smart watches you see on Alibaba, which use ESP-32 or other low-power SOCs. I saw one recently at a meet-up and the guy who was wearing claimed it was completely open-source and he could run whatever he wanted to on it. It did not have heartrate monitoring or anything other than clock on it, as far as I could tell.

What did it look like? All the ones I've seen have been pretty ugly - plastic cases, etc.

It looked like exactly what you said. Plastic.

The original was Watchy: https://watchy.sqfmi.com/

Not only can you run anything you want on it but it supports the Arduino IDE and Micropython. I assume all of the Alibaba ones are based off of Watchy.

I have one of this still in it's box unassembled.

I like the idea. But I've been wearing mechanical watches for about a decade now...

The biggest issue is the software. It's mostly abysmal. The best effort I've seen so far has been InfiniTime for the PineTime. It's very difficult without full-time employees working on improving things.

> will accelerate our efforts to produce new hardware

Don't do that. Don't give me hope...

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