#715 – Shiny New Pebble with Eric Migicovsky

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Welcome Eric Migicovsky of Pebble!

• Pebble is back after Eric worked with Google to open source PebbleOS and he reaquired the naming rights
• Eric returns to the hardware space after 7 years, including working at yCombinator, a famous accelerator for early stage startups, and on Beeper, a cross platform app for messaging.
• While discussing the difficulties of hardware project, Chris brought up a recent post about a high wattage lamp project HN
• One thing Eric likes about hardware projects vs software is that “hardware projects can be done” as in they have a defined end state
• A more recent project is a smart ring – The Index 01.
• The non-replaceable battery is driven by the product specs, also the need for reliability
• The ring doesn’t immediately need to be in range of a phone, it syncs the memory after the fact
• Pebble is no longer a VC backed startup with a subscription model, so that changes a lot of constraints
• Initially they sold 2 million watches, and 250 million in sales
• Eric is driven by “gadgets”. He read “pen computing” and “popular mechanics” as a kid
• Consumer companies vs other types (and why Eric likes the former)
• Pebble went through different phases
• The team spent 6 months in China, designing the first consumer version and working directly with factories
• CTO of (original) Pebble, Andrew Witte, was a somewhat early guest of The Amp Hour
• How much did the China ecosystem drive design decisions?
• There was no such thing as a smartwatch factory (but are there ever now!)
• The book Apple in China is supposed to be a great read and mirrors the Pebble Experience
• We heard from Chrissy Meyer when she was on the show about working with the Apple Watch manufacturing proces
• Water proof methods codeveloping in China
• It’s an interative process of submerging designs in a glass vessel with pressure and bubbles seep out of the device at different points
• The remedy? According to Eric: “More Glue” 😀
• Eric shares his process on a YouTube channel called Tick Talk (not to be confused with the shortform video site)
• There is a video with the CEO of SiFli, makers of the Bluetooth chip that is in the most recent Pebble devices
• One interesting feature is a custom bus to the Sharp-made ePaper-like screen used onboard
• FreeRTOS pebble OS
• What is PebbleOS?
• It’s targeted at an m33 class ARM chip and the kernel is FreeRTOS
• The bluetooth stack is nimBLE
• Eric went back and forth on whether to port to Zephyr for the Bluetooth stack and hw support from vendors like Nordic Semiconductor
• The Index 01 ring is Dialog Semiconductor (now part of Renesas) part
• One challenge is that rings have different sizes…so they mill the rings based on orders. The larger rings get an extra battery!