Category Archives: Pebble

Pebble Development in 2020

After a fair amount of trial and error I now have the Pebble SDK working on my Mac (macOS 10.15.4 Catalina). I was working from the guide here. I can now create, build and deploy programs and watch faces to my Pebble watch.

Firstly I had problems with the virtualenv command:

cd ~/pebble-dev/pebble-sdk-4.3-mac
virtualenv --no-site-packages .env
source .env/bin/activate
CFLAGS="" pip install -r requirements.txt
deactivate

It turns out the –no-site-packages flag is not required and should be omitted (see here for details).

I then had issues with no SDK being installed (and the scripts trying in vain to locate the SDK on the Internet). After trying:

pebble new-project testing

I was greeted with:

No SDK installed; installing the latest one...

Consulting Google yielded:

The key part of the reddit post is path to the SDK. I used the following to successfully install the SDK:

pebble sdk install https://github.com/aveao/PebbleArchive/raw/master/SDKCores/sdk-core-4.3.tar.bz2

The last fix was disabling the analytics tracking by creating a NO_TRACKING file in the SDK directory.

End of 2016 Update

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted an update.  Apologies to my regular readers…

Here is a point form update:

  • Work and life are very busy (so no change there);
  • I’m not sure what I think about Fitbit buying Pebble (I don’t remember an acquisition like this ever going well);
  • The finches are doing well, the Painteds seem happy and are breeding, the Zebras perhaps a little too happy…;
  • Bird watching has taken a bit of a hit (closely related to amount of free time available unfortunately);
  • Using a 1975 Mini Clubman as a daily driver seems to be going well (after the clutch was replaced).

Pebble Smartwatch

I am now the proud owner of a Pebble Smartwatch (I went for the “Classic” version).  It seems to play nicely with my iPhone 5s.  My favourite “watchface” at the moment is the built in “time as text” one (although I do think the iWatch one is cool).

I have installed the Pebble SDK and I am going to try to develop an app/watchface or two.  Stay tuned.