pebble time retrospective

I got a Pebble Time smartwatch, but it turns out I don't wear it much, despite wearing my original (OG) Pebble all the time. I don't even keep it habitually charged.

There isn't one particular reason:

• There are two reasons why I have to keep taking the watch off, something I never had to do with the OG Pebble which I wore 24/7:
  • The charge port is inaccessible while wearing the watch. I didn't realise before hand how much of a problem that would be: I tend to take it off to charge and forget to put it back on.
  • The wristband and/or shape does something weird to my skin that neither the OG pebble nor the 10 wristbands I wear do; especially if the Pebble gets wet (which it otherwise would often, several times a day).
• Application loading is heavily coupled to the phone. I got the Pebble because it has long battery life, but I've found myself in situations where I can't use (e.g.) the compass because my phone has gone flat (which is does by the end of every day). That turns the compass from something I can rely on into a gimmick.
• Not really an ongoing reason, but as I'm in grumble mood, I found the software upgrade experience from OG to Time quite frustrating: I needed a different app from the Pebble app that I already had installed, and it seemed to conflict in a weird way with the existing app.

I have been hoping someone would make a smartstrap to expose charging, but to no avail. Now there's an SDK available for the serial port (which is also the charge point), I might start fixing that problem myself. One day.

xkcd 320 compliant watchface for Pebble watch

I released my xkcd 320 compliant watchface for the Pebble e-ink watch: xkcd320-1.1.pbw

It looks like this:

And the source code is here on github.

libpebble on debian

Getting my pebble talking to my linux laptop took a while - mostly because I didn't know much about the linux bluetooth stack.

I'm running all this as root. I might eventually figure out how to do it as a normal user.

Can we see the pebble at all? This doesn't always show the pebble to me - i think because its not waiting long enough for the pebble to be active on bluetooth.

# hcitool scan
Scanning ...
        00:18:2F:CC:EC:A9       Pebble ECA9

In one window:

# bluez-simple-agent
Agent registered

In another window:

# l2ping 00:18:2f:cc:ec:a9
Ping: 00:18:2f:cc:ec:a9 from E0:06:E6:BA:33:AB (data size 44) ...
44 bytes from 00:18:2f:cc:ec:a9 id 0 time 8.54ms
Send failed: Connection reset by peer

It gives that connect reset message every time I try this ping... but carry on anyway.

# rfcomm bind 0 00:18:2f:cc:ec:a9

next:

./p.py --pebble_id ECA9 ping

will make the pebble buzz and show a ping message on screen.

Now run as many p.py commands as you like.

At some point when I did this previously, it got a persistent pairing with the pebble - I have no idea where in my hacking around the persistent pairing happened as at one stage I had to do it for every interaction...