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+--- Thread: Pebble/Rebble compat? (/showthread.php?tid=8745)
Pebble/Rebble compat? - cscott - 01-10-2020
Has anyone looked closely at the work the RebbleOS folks did in creating an open source version of the Pebble OS?
It seems to be based on FreeRTOS and the Pebble hardware is very similar, although presumably we'd only use the center 144x168 pixels of the display. https://github.com/PebbleA2/wiki/wiki/Watch-Comparison is a good summary of the pebble hardware. https://github.com/ginge/FreeRTOS-Pebble seems to be the main site for the pebble firmware reimplementation.
The main limitation seems to be that "the Pebble hardware is very similar", that is, PineTime doesn't have a lot of extra CPU, RAM, or Flash to play with. So the clone implementation can't cut corners, it would have to be at least as good as the original 2012 PebbleOS. And PineTime has a lot of features that Pebble doesn't...
Still, it would be really nice to be able to cross-compile some of the old pebble watchfaces and see them run on new hardware -- or better, upload a .pbw directly to the watch via bluetooth. https://developer.rebble.io/developer.pebble.com/docs/c/index.html documents the pebble APIs you'd need to reimplement. I looked but couldn't find any documentation on the PBW file format for watch faces. https://github.com/pebble-dev/neographics has a reimplementation of the pebble graphics APIs.
I'm interested in comparing notes with anyone who's thought hard about this.
RE: Pebble/Rebble compat? - JF002 - 01-12-2020
(01-10-2020, 11:47 PM)cscott Wrote: Has anyone looked closely at the work the RebbleOS folks did in creating an open source version of the Pebble OS?
It seems to be based on FreeRTOS and the Pebble hardware is very similar, although presumably we'd only use the center 144x168 pixels of the display. https://github.com/PebbleA2/wiki/wiki/Watch-Comparison is a good summary of the pebble hardware. https://github.com/ginge/FreeRTOS-Pebble seems to be the main site for the pebble firmware reimplementation.
The main limitation seems to be that "the Pebble hardware is very similar", that is, PineTime doesn't have a lot of extra CPU, RAM, or Flash to play with. So the clone implementation can't cut corners, it would have to be at least as good as the original 2012 PebbleOS. And PineTime has a lot of features that Pebble doesn't...
Still, it would be really nice to be able to cross-compile some of the old pebble watchfaces and see them run on new hardware -- or better, upload a .pbw directly to the watch via bluetooth. https://developer.rebble.io/developer.pebble.com/docs/c/index.html documents the pebble APIs you'd need to reimplement. I looked but couldn't find any documentation on the PBW file format for watch faces. https://github.com/pebble-dev/neographics has a reimplementation of the pebble graphics APIs.
I'm interested in comparing notes with anyone who's thought hard about this.
I've seen people chatting about that on the PineTime chat, but I don't know if anyone is working on a port right now.
In my opinion, it would be really nice if a port existed, but I don't know how difficult it would be...
RE: Pebble/Rebble compat? - VMMainFrame - 01-13-2020
(01-10-2020, 11:47 PM)cscott Wrote: Has anyone looked closely at the work the RebbleOS folks did in creating an open source version of the Pebble OS?
It seems to be based on FreeRTOS and the Pebble hardware is very similar, although presumably we'd only use the center 144x168 pixels of the display. https://github.com/PebbleA2/wiki/wiki/Watch-Comparison is a good summary of the pebble hardware. https://github.com/ginge/FreeRTOS-Pebble seems to be the main site for the pebble firmware reimplementation.
The main limitation seems to be that "the Pebble hardware is very similar", that is, PineTime doesn't have a lot of extra CPU, RAM, or Flash to play with. So the clone implementation can't cut corners, it would have to be at least as good as the original 2012 PebbleOS. And PineTime has a lot of features that Pebble doesn't...
Still, it would be really nice to be able to cross-compile some of the old pebble watchfaces and see them run on new hardware -- or better, upload a .pbw directly to the watch via bluetooth. https://developer.rebble.io/developer.pebble.com/docs/c/index.html documents the pebble APIs you'd need to reimplement. I looked but couldn't find any documentation on the PBW file format for watch faces. https://github.com/pebble-dev/neographics has a reimplementation of the pebble graphics APIs.
I'm interested in comparing notes with anyone who's thought hard about this.
The PBW files are standard ZIP files. I wrote a very simple watch face for the Pebble and the PBW file contains a BIN file, 2 JSON files and a PBPACK file whose format I don't know.
I agree, being able to use the Pebble watch faces would be very valuable.
RE: Pebble/Rebble compat? - Luke - 01-14-2020
The Rebble devs have at dev unit, so perhaps at some point down the line we'll see a port... lets hope
