My last Pebble recently died. What should I do now?

[Avamander]

so i know there is an effort to rewrite pebbleOS, to make it open source. it is called rebbleOS, and i suggest to poke the devs and see if they have any plans of supporting pinetime.

i hope they have or can be convinced to do so.

@norayr 

There's multiple issues here which make it very unlikely.

a) The PineTime does not have the resources to run the current "RebbleOS" with its current architecture. (Feature parity or more is however technically possible.)

b) The Rebble dev community either wants to do things fully the "Pebble" way or it's not worth doing for them. PineTime's lack of always-on display has already disqualified it from being considered by some who have more prominent roles in the Rebble community. The mindset matters here.

c) RebbleOS development is slow - development is difficult and the Pebble hardware is disgustingly proprietary. 


Full feature parity on a newly built OS is much more likely than RebbleOS. You are better off at picking a project you like and contribute with testing pull requests and new releases, fixing small bugs, writing documentation, helping people.

[Peter Gamma]

Pebble was a Linux watch. As a replacement for it I would choose a Linux watch based on AsteroidOS. I think it is possible to develop for instance an open source sports watch first on the PinePhone and then migrate it to an AsteroidOS Linux watch:


https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10172


There is a sync app which can synchronize data between the PinePhone and AsteroidOS:


https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11756


There aren t many apps yet for AsteroidOS yet, but the built in apps are freely available and and can be modified:

https://github.com/AsteroidOS

[rcolistete]

Pebble was not running Linux, so it was not a Linux smartwatch.

[Peter Gamma]

Pebble. The smartwatch with Linux at its heart:

https://www.unixmen.com/pebble-the-smart...its-heart/

[danielt]

Pebble. The smartwatch with Linux at its heart:

https://www.unixmen.com/pebble-the-smart...its-heart/

The title of that article appear to be entirely unrelated to the content that follows (which mentions Linux exactly zero times). Pebble was based on STM32F205RE and doesn't have a resources need to run Linux. At the heart of the stock Pebble OS is FreeRTOS.

[Peter Gamma]

FreeRTOS or Linux, whatever. A Linux watch based on AsteroidOS can run any desktop linux software which runs on ARM based systems, and is therefore a good replacement for a Pebble. Desktop software can be resized and remote controlled from a PinePhone with mini keyboard and mouse with solutions like xfeeerdp.

But this solution certainly needs development. Desirable would be for instance a TicWatch Pro with AsteroidOS wich can run desktop Linux software and a user interface ported form the following custom ROM, with a development thread of more than 400 pages:

https://forum.xda-developers.com/smartwa...st83662467

This would be a dignified Pebble replacement, and a smartwatch which deserves the name “smartwatch”.

[zer0sig]

That TicWatch Pro looks like a nice piece of kit. I'm not looking to spend 300 bucks on a smartwatch right now, but that looks pretty impressive and I might change my mind. a real Linux/Unix-style OS is something I'd really enjoy.

I'd love to put an ultralight unixy OS o the pinetime. If there were one available. 64MHz could be done, but 64KB is pretty light. A port of Lunix or OS-9 might work but unless this hardware became incredibly popular, it'd never happen. Still, excited to have a watch to play with where the goal is to hack some different purposes into it. I've never been much of a coder but I have built and configured thousands of machines with different OSes, and I'm looking forward to trying different builds for this, bugtesting, etc.

[Peter Gamma]

If it is possible to run Linux on a watch, is a Linux watch not the most power saving Linux device which is available? I’m looking for a Linux device to acquire sensor data. There is software available for ANT+ and Bluetooth low energy sensors which runs on Linux:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...low+energy

but there is Linux software available for ECG and EEG sensors:

https://brainflow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

If someone manages to run this software on a PineTime, I’m ready to buy one.

[wibble]

What precisely are you looking to do - acquire data for later processing, or process it as it's collected? How long for, and how much data is involved? Have you tried any of the things people have suggested so far, and if so what was the outcome?