Founder of Pebble and CEO of CoreDevices, Eric Migicovsky, joins Chris to talk about the history of the Pebble Watch and resurrecting the hardware to serve a very loyal ecosystem. Along the way, Eric has continued to create new gadgets like the Index 01 ring.
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!