Google Open Sources Pebble Smartwatch Source Code

8 years after Pebble shut down, Google announced that it has open sourced the Pebble smartwatch code base to assist the community that still exists.

“The source code that powered Pebble smartwatches is now available for download,” Google’s Matthieu Jeanson, Katharine Berry, and Liam McLoughlin write in the announcement post. “This is part of an effort from Google to help and support the volunteers who have come together to maintain functionality for Pebble watches after the original company ceased operations in 2016.”

Pebble started as a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 and the company sold over 2 million Pebble smartwatches before it was acquired by Fitbit, which was later purchased itself by Google. Today, Google owns Pebble’s intellectual property. But thanks to a thriving community that continues to support Pebble devices through the Rebble project, the firm has stripped some proprietary code for chipset support and Bluetooth and released the rest of the code base as open source.

“This repository contains the entire OS, which provides all the standard smartwatch functionality – notifications, media controls, fitness tracking, and support for custom apps and watch faces – on tiny ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers,” the company notes. “Built with FreeRTOS, it contains multiple modules for memory management, graphics, and timekeeping, as well as an extensive framework to load and run custom applications written in C, as well as in JavaScript via the JerryScript JavaScript engine. The Pebble architecture allowed for a lightweight system delivering a rich user experience as well as a very long battery life.”

It’s not possible to compile or link the code base into a new firmware update, indeed, it appears that this will require “a non-trivial amount of work.” But this is a nice thing to do for the community, and it should go a long way toward helping enthusiasts continue their efforts to support Pebble devices.