Pebble Eric's call to action

Last friday I had an email from Eric Migicovsky (original founder of Pebble and founder of the new RePebble company announced in January) with an update and a call to action while we wait for a new iteration of the beloved watches (hopefully in time before my Pebble Time Steel passes away!). The call to action had small, medium, and big projects and I spent my weekend on two small projects: (1) pulling all my old Pebbles out and trying to get them to work and (2) compiling a watch face. Read on for the details!

Take your old Pebble out of the drawer

I wear my Pebble Time Steel daily, but I did find an original Pebble a couple months ago at a swap meet in Navacerrada that I bought for a haggled down price of 5€:

Unfortunately the charging cable for the original pebble is different than the Pebble Time. I tried cutting the end off an old USB cable and sticking the red and black cable to the connectors but I did not have any luck and threw it in my closet as a future project… and Eric’s email nudged me into trying a bit harder and I was able to get it to boot!

s Alive!!!

But the joy was short lived as it did not finish booting and gave me the sad pebble face:

So a search of the internet lead me to all the Pebble error codes:

Error Codes fe504502, fe504503, and fe504504. These error codes indicate issues which can often be resolved by restarting the watch from recovery mode.

So duck tape to the rescue to hold the black and red wire against the connectors while I push and hold back, up and select buttons all at the same time:

After multiple attempts and multiple re-adjustments of said duct tape I was able to get it started in the recovery mode, but alas it never finished and would reboot. I then left the duct tape for a while, but it never held a charge, so if I was to get it work I would need a long USB cable always connected to it. Or I could change the battery, but until I am able to get it to fully boot not worth going down that route.

That was fun and inspired me to get pictures off all my Pebbles lined up like little sardines:

Left to right:

  1. OG Pebble model number 301 released 2013
  2. Pebble Time model number 501 released 2015
  3. Pebble Time Steel model number 511 released 2015

Install the Pebble SDK, build an app and run it

The second small ask was something that I had tried to do a few years back only to discover my my Mac where I had had the SDK (software development kit) installed had stopped working because Python at some point had been upgraded, and no amount of fighting was I able to get it to work again. In moments like that is when you really want VM’s or even better a docker container with a static image that once you get to work you don’t change and just keep a copy of the image for when needed. I tried without any luck to get a docker container to work at the time (surprisingly I was unable to find any of this activity documented) and gave up. But in Eric’s email he gave a link to a virtual machine with the SDK installed and working. Yea! Joy!

VMware recently opened up the license on the VMWare Profession version to home users for free, so I decided to go that route and after some fighting got the VM to boot:

I then uploaded my FrankenWatch (discussed previously here) source code to the VM and got compiling and it built on the first try! I then sent it to my watch and it was installed on the first try! OMG this is what I remember from back in 2016!

Where to go from here?

Well, now that I have a working development environment again for the Pebble I am not entirely clear where it will lead me. Maybe I will clean up the source code and upload FrankenWatch to github, maybe I will make a new application, or more likely I will just keep the VM handy to use if some need arises!

Thanks Eric for a great weekend!

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