Looking to do something more ambitious with broader appeal, Migicovsky and his team developed the Pebble watch and decided to sidestep more traditional tech funding routes and took their pitch straight to consumers on Kickstarter.
As Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky explained to Paste, his team already had some experience figuring out the tentpoles of how a potential smartwatch might work, having started back in 2008 with the inPulse watch designed for Blackberry phones (it found some modest success, but didn’t move the needle). It was in that wild west of consumer technology, circa 2012, that Pebble Technology decided to take its burgeoning smartwatch expertise to the masses with a crowdfunding campaign to offer the company’s first formal product: the Pebble watch. But flashback a decade ago, and the idea of smartwatches and wearable technology was nascent, nerdy and largely unproven. Apple Watches and Fitbits are ubiquitous today. But had a few things gone a bit differently over the past few years? It could’ve been. To vote later for a colour (such as Ubuntu Orange!) you need to pre-order in the colour-Pebble category ($125+shipping).If you’re crafting a list of influential tech giants, Pebble Technology probably isn’t all that close to the top of it. The Pebble Kickstarter campaign runs until. The race is on for the first person who can get a prototype in August 2012 and integrate Ubuntu’s libnotify-osd work with the Pebble watch, in time for Ubuntu 12.10 in six months time! For those with a pre-order, it will be possible to vote on additional-colour in addition to Artic White, Cherry Red and Jet Black. If that’s all getting a bit technical, Andrew notes that The Gimp and ImageMagick (both in the Ubuntu Software Centre) are used for processing the bitmaps and pictures before they are sent to the Pebble watch prototypes.
One of the main parts of the Pebble is the Bluetooth interface for talking to smart phones, for which many hours have been spent testing with Ben Lam’s Python-based ‘LightBlue’ framework and utilities like hcitool. The firmware development toolchain is CodeSourcery GCC for compiling, OpenOCD for working with the JTAG, and GDB (the GNU debugger) for finding all hard to solve bugs.
Lots of open source is also being used to make the watch tick. Andrew’s desk on a typical day has a sprawl of cables, a Lego car, some low-level JTAG programmers, USB prototyping cables, several half-finished Pebble boards …and, in the middle is Xubuntu (Ubuntu running with an XFCE desktop) for the development and debugging. Andrew Witte ( second from the left in the dream team) is the Lead Engineer working on the firmware and an Ubuntu fan.
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