This december it will be 8 years since Pebble Technology went out of business. I still wear and use my Pebble watch daily, and boy o boy, when it dies it is gonna make me lonesome! So before that fateful day comes and I will be too teary-eyed to type about it, I decided to sing the praises of the Pebble Watch.

How it all started

So it all started late on a Friday night back in March 2015 when my wife had already gone to sleep and I was left to my own enjoying single malt scotch and going down technological rabbit holes. I had been eyeing the the Pebble for quite a while and saw they had launched a new KickStarter campaign for their next iteration of hardware. I actually had a Timex Datalink back in 1995 and loved having all my contacts on my wrist and the Pebble Watch had been on my radar since they launched their first generation 2012 (also on Kickstarter) and their second generation (Pebble Steel) in 2014. What really intrigued me was what seemed to be a large fan base and easy development of applications and watch faces. So my inhibitions lowered by previously consumed scotches I found my credit card and joined the crowd source movement:

The cool thing about this crowd source stuff is that they actually use the capital of the pledges to implement the new thing. The unfortunate thing is that means you have to wait for them gather the capital and implement the new thing. For me that meant waiting until July of 2015 (4 months) until it arrived:

My notes from the first days using the Pebble Time are quite sparse (note: dates in in European more logical fasion of Day/Month/year):

 - 06/07/2015 just got back from Cali and had the pebble time waiting for me (it
  arrived the day we left (17/06/2015) for the states!)
 - 09/07/2015 testing all sorts of different watch faces these days
 really like the idea of a full calendar, but unfortunately have not found a perfect fit.
 Timley (v2.5) so far is the best fit.
 this one is *almost* perfect, but the day starts on sunday, might have to compile it

The love begins

And then, only 8 days after receiving the Pebble I began trying to make my own watch face because like goldilocks the offering was not just quite not what I wanted. And boy was I in for a treat! In an afternoon I was able to install the Pebble provided dev kit that allowed cross compiling in an easy and painless way and made it super easy to push the new app to the Pebble watch. This blew me away, because every time Apple released a new version of the iPhone operating system they released a new version of XCode which was needed to make applications for the iPhone, and every time this happened I would be at least a day if not a week trying get this development environment to work fighting cryptic errors and searching for solutions in forums. Here are my notes from that joyous day:

 14/07/2015
 OMG.
 I just got my custom calendar watch face tweaked just the way i like it (day starting on monday, 
 and month format) compiled and running on my pebble!
 Holy cows that was fun and painless.
 Here was the whole process:
 (1) downloaded source from William Heaton´s PebbleCalendarWatch from  git
 (2) installed pebble dev kit via homebrew:
      ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
      brew install pebble/pebble-sdk/pebble-sdk
 (3) converted project:
      pebble convert-project
 (4) compiled project (this actually took about an hour to get it to compile and tweaked)
      pebble build 
 (5) enabled debug mode via app
 (6) installed the watch face:
      pebble install --phone 10.0.0.104

What Pebble did right

By making it really easy to develop Pebble empowered the user community to contribute. And this created a community that then contributed back two fold by making their creation available and by making their code available on GitHub and open source. This created a vibrate and active exchange of ideas and programs all building on one another. My watch face that I finally got “just right” in 2016 was based on Timely and then from there I kept adding customizations that I copied out of other projects so it was and did just what I wanted. I present FrankenPebble:

Here is a rundown on customizations and why it is “just right”:

• 5 week calendar view: two previous weeks, current week, and next two weeks
• The green line around the border it a step tracker that indicates current steps with a complete border being 10k steps. The line is white and turns green once the 10k goal is hit
• When bluetooth connection is lost the watch vibrates and the time is displayed in red

Other things that just make it a killer smart watch: The battery lasts for ever! Mine is really old and I still only have to charge it about every two weeks. In the beginning it was about once a month. This is accomplished by having an electronic ink screen that requires no energy once drawn as apposed to an LCD screen that is constantly consuming battery. It is also easy to see during the day, and has a light for night.

If Pebble is so amazing what when wrong?

I am sure the internet is full of deep dives of what went wrong and why the company went out of business, but here I will offer a personal anecdote on what I imagine contributed to their problems.
The Pebble Time was water resistant up to 30m so I did not take it off for my first summer swim at los Bloques in Ribadeo and when I was drying off I saw a sad face on my Pebble. I said, “on no, that can’t be good” and quickly took a picture:

I say it was good that I quickly snapped a picture, because the sad face disappeared shortly after and the device was completely dead. I emailed support and got an automated response with a case number and this ominous message “We are currently experiencing a higher-than-average amount of emails but we will respond to you as quickly as possible.”
The next email was two weeks later requesting address information to send me a replacement. And sure enough a week later a brand new non kick starter Pebble Time was delivered to my house:

So whatever profit they had made off of me was most likely eaten by having to send me a FULL brand new one, with no way to fix the bad one… and that is why it is really really hard for a small company to do hardware and why there are so few small american or european companies making hardware.

Here is what is on my Pebble

Here are the things I currently have on my Pebble (i forgot to mention after my replacement Time arrived I ordered a Steel and sold the new replacement Time to my buddy Julio):

• FrankenWatch: never uploaded to GitHub, but have shared binary with multiple people (If any one is interested in code or binary reach out to me (email is at bottom of post))
• Timer+: easy to use stopwatch or countdown app. Quick Launch Up button.
• Skunk: App that us can use for QR or barcodes (for example I have all my grocery store codes in it so on checkout it is really quick to have them scan my watch). Quick Launch Down button.
• Counter: I think I first found this to count how many times my youngest daughter said “mommy” on a trip back from Ribadeo to Madrid (6 hour trip).
• Calendar: and app that shows the current month, but possible to go forwards or backwards in time easily and quickly. Quick Launch Select button.
• TideTableChart: one of the few none open source apps and paid apps I use, but this thing is REALLY cool for showing tides. It has a companion app that is the paid part.
• Tides: this is a watch face that shows current tides.

and that is all! But boy when this baby dies, I will have a hard time finding something that even comes close to it!

Thanks for reading and feel free to give feedback or comments via email (andrew@jupiterstation.net).