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Comment by voxadam | Hacker News Reader

The Nordic nRF52840[1] SoC on which these are based support not only Bluetooth 5.4 but also Thread, Zigbee, and 802.15.4. These three standards are becoming commonplace in the home automation space. Has any thought been given to how the new Pebble devices could utilize these protocols?

[1] https://www.nordicsemi.com/Products/nRF52840

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Nope, but the OS is open source so you could try getting it to work yourself: https://github.com/pebble-dev/pebble-firmware

Is it actually open source though? The repository description may be outdated then, but it currently says this:

> This is the latest version of the internal repository from Pebble Technology providing the software to run on Pebble watches. Proprietary source code has been removed from this repository and it will not compile as-is. This is for information only.

This just hasn't been updated since it was forked from the initial OSS release from Google, I've started a discussion on the firmware Discord to update it.

Just a guess, but Nordic pushes a proprietary bluetooth stack. You don't have to use it, but it's the fastest way to get up and running.

edit: not sure they use the proprietary stack... at the very least, it looks like they're in the process of switching to a free BT stack

> Proprietary source code has been removed from this repository and it will not compile as-is. This is for information only

How are you supposed to do that?

Pretty sure those different radio stacks do not run very well in parallel or if they do, they'd likely start to starve the rest in terms of resources needed.

The nRF52840 is not the most performant, I would've really liked if they had chosen a SoC, like the nRF5340, with more RAM or cores for this reason amongst others.

There are similar devices (i.e. SiLabs) that allow multi-protocol use with the radio (I would expect Nordic to have a similar feature set), tho yes, you're right the resource issue would be a major limitation.

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