amazing! does it provide any other protections against other battery drain risks? glad you guys though of that haha, definitely will be ordering one :)
You can use it just as a button - that's one of the ways you can hack it. Just hook the button up to whichever action (webhook, Tasker, etc) you'd like.
Any chance of diy, at-home battery replacements? That would definitely let me consider it. I don't mind if it's a 10 hour process to replace the battery. Just the option to have a device that lasts is great.
Waterproofing, tiny batteries, yadda yadda... it's either "charge it weekly", or "recycle" every year or two (eg: $9.99/mo)
Thinking through: many people in the pebble-verse (back in the day) were super-hot about wanting the voice-control stuff/microphone responses to text messages. Instead of thinking about this as a standalone "ring", think of this as a "remote button + mic" for the pebble watch.
As a (former) avid biker, being able to spam: "How much longer until sunset (and how far away am I from home [and will I get home before sunset])?" and having a rough answer "on the wrist" is super useful.
On the Home Assistant front, the Apple ecosystem is waaaay too universal for Siri-isms. We have 3-4 home pod's (upstairs, downstairs, kids bedroom, guest room), along with phones (car-play), and airpods. All of them can be used as "Hey Siri, set a timer, turn on/off the lights, what's the weather, etc".
Looking at the HA voice controls, it's utter garbage trash (unfortunately) until The Hackers(tm) get around to fixing things up, BUUUT we're still screwed b/c HA speakers/mic's will be worse than Apple's, and HA will never come out with AirPods or CarPlay integration (and likely: Apple will never support a "non-Siri" voice connection via their microphone relationships).
This ring is an incredibly interesting way to sidestep all of that!
You have the ring (mic input, 2yr battery), you have the watch (text display, 1 month battery), and your phone (cellular + storage + compute, 1 day battery), all of which are nominally "every day carry" items.
In the home automation world, having your star-trek communicator pin (quite literally!) on your finger at all times w/ a 2yr battery life is VERY VERY intriguing!
I feel like this should be promoted or made clearer on the product page - this is how I think many people would prefer to use it, provided it could trigger voice input on the pebble/device/other watch - for example, as a Siri trigger.
Given that the user will typically have their watch on them as well, why not make the ring a battery-less BLE transmitter that triggers voice input on the watch? It’s still one-handed operation, but now the battery life is infinite since there’s no battery? The disposable ring seems like a solution in search of a problem to me, unfortunately.
Piezo switches like the one you linked have a minimum size to generate the power necessary, and that minimum size is larger than the entire current ring.
The power generation portion of that switch is around 1.4x1.4cm and can power the transmitter to send a signal over 40m. I think it’s likely that it could be adapted into a ring form.
Are you still considering implementing the feature as a Pebble app as well? As someone who is very forgetful I like the low-friction external memory concept, but it would be nice if I could try it out (admittedly sub-optimally) before jumping in with a second device. It could also be a nice option for Index owners to keep a similar flow even when they don't want to wear the Index for whatever reason.
In general I really like the idea of a local-first, privacy-first, one-way/low-interaction digital assistant regardless of the form factor. A big frustration I have with Gemini as a voice assistant is that I have to wait out the other half of super simple interactions like setting a timer or making a note.
Love the idea as a very easily distracted individual, but the battery is keeping me on the fence. I understand how charging circuitry makes this product a non-starter, but is there any hope of the battery being replaceable?
If you look at other rechargeable smart rings they're in the $250 to $300 range, plus a $10/month subscription. We didn't want to do that for a new product like this.
I like the price here, but my question was not about adding charging circuitry, but some way to open the ring and replace the battery once it's depleted.
Why didn’t you make it just a button which activates the watch? It’d be an addon to pebble watch. It couldn’t be used standalone, but you could make it rechargeable and it would solve your issue (actions with only one hand)
Do you mean that this is technically possible, or that this is a feature that will be supported? I've preordered the Time 2, so having the ability to configure it that way to significantly extend the battery life of the ring could be interesting. On the other hand, using it standalone might be fine for me. I wouldn't really know how fast I might go through the battery without using it for a while.
2: the transcription happens on your phone for free (or via subscription to a slightly better transcription model, not sure about privacy for the paid model)
3: ok to wash hands or shower, but just 1 foot of depth (so no swimming)
I really like the thought and the format, but I do not like that I can't change the battery. Even if it is not easy, I still think there should be a way to change the battery.
Can I use something like syncthing to easily backup the recordings and transcripts off my phone?
Google's Recorder app makes this a big PITA if I don't want to enable upload to cloud storage, there is a very tedious manual way to export recordings.
I really just want plain old data and to be able to copy or delete files via the filesystem. And not be required to use some cloud service.
As you framed the device as an extension of memory, I'm wondering whether you can query your notes/memory with voice. I'd like to ask questions to the ring, e.g.: "What was that book that Jerry recommended?"
Is that an existing feature, or is that something possibly planned for future?
I actually like the device and can see the purpose of it - I’ve tried to kick together similar solutions in the past, but I like the very “one thing only” nature of this.
That said, I absolutely cannot buy a device like this without a replaceable battery. I don’t actually care about the recharge, I get what you’re trying to do with it, but given the state of the e-waste world and, bluntly, the history of hardware brands - a big, big part of the sales pitch for the pebble is the OSS nature of the device because we need to hedge against any one company for longevity. I’d seriously consider this if I knew the battery was replaceable, but I can’t bet on you being around in 4, 6, or 8 years, and I’m not willing to buy intentionally disposable tech anymore.
This isn't a question I understand, but I appreciate you writing it. At the end of the day it's up to you - if you think this is useful, please use it. If you don't want to use it because of the 4.7 grams of e-waste, I do get it.
All consumer tech is intentionally disposable. That's life. Especially for tiny smart rings that are water resistant. It's a ring, it's going to get banged up, you'll lose it or smash it. It's new tech - there will always be a new version, etc.
Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.
could this be a used a bluetooth microphone, so I could use it with a laptop as a quick voice dictation/input for various uses? I'm thinking like a simple microphone for an localy hosted app like Hex: https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex
what safety measures does this have to avoid some incident (held down button, software bug, etc) draining the entire battery within a few hours, thus bricking the device?
It has a hard cutoff built into the firmware at two minutes so after that point the recording stops and the ring turns off until the next button press.
Happy to see new pebble products !
I have few questions :
What do you mean by never need charging ? Is it a disposable product (or is there a disposable, removable battery) or does it have a way of recharging itself by energy harvesting ?
Isn't this feature of pushing a button, talking to the microphone and getting a transcription in the app already available on the pebble smartwatches ?
Please note our CLA explicitly include a clause to require Core Devices to distribute all contributions under an OSI-compatible FOSS license (e.g. GPLv3). So no contributions can be 'stolen'.
But OSI-compatible FOSS licenses include pushover ones like MIT, so even though you couldn't steal all of the contributions to make a proprietary fork, any other company then could.
but in the rest of the ecosystem a bunch of the inherited code is already Apache or MIT. so, i presume you have already forked the other repos to relicense them. can you drop a link?
I'm the first to agree that contributions can't be stolen in this scenario but read the threads I'm referring to. People feel that way anyway if you stop supporting a component or distribute your focus between a free and a paid tier.
What we need is more awareness that looking at the license alone is not enough to make an informed decision if contributing to a project is aligned with the contributors attitude and personal goals.
With that in mind: Thank you for putting the CLA right in the repo where it belongs and people can easily find it. Many organizations put a license upfront and bury the CLA. For a particularly bad example try MonoDB.
Material color is very tough, especially comparing metallic paint to polycarbonate. Lighting matters, reflections matter. We tried our best, but yes, obviously it's not exactly the same.
I don't know if using them would wreck the economics of the matter, but this is exactly why Pantone exists. Perhaps Rivian uses them, and someone there might be willing to share with you the exact Pantone code.
And of course, video adds another layer of complexity. Would you say that the video looks accurate to you, or does calling it "Rivian blue" help people understand what it looks like in real life?
I don't actually own a Rivian. I've seen them from afar. They look cool. I have not held a Pebble Time up to a Rivian yet. Maybe I'll creepily do that in downtown Palo Alto today :)
Exciting, except it runs Android Wear OS by Google instead of a deGoogled OS, and in the comments it says: "Repairability is admirable but only 3 years of security updates isn't near enough"
FTA: "We’re also making sure that our new watches are more repairable than old Pebble watches. The back cover of Pebble Time 2 is screwed in. You can remove the back cover and replace the battery."
So the battery of the Pebble Time 2 (the watch I bought to replace my Fossil HR Collider which replaced my orig. Pebble 2) is user serviceable. I had to open my Pebble 2 because my buttons were falling off. I bought a second hand donor (Pebble OC, since I ditched my broken Pebble OC at some point) and unfortunately I failed to succeed the transplantation of the buttons. Which made me very sad.
I also very much liked you could turn the radios off on the Pebble 2. The HR was useless though. But if I want a good quality of that, I'd go for Garmin or (if I were in the Apple ecosystem) an Apple Watch.
I had a few Pebbles back in the day and I loved them dearly - still have them laying around so the revival should be great if I can resurrect them.
After Pebble went kaput, I got an Apple Watch through a work reward thing and honestly it’s been solid. I turned off a lot of notifications and mostly use it for things I really want to know, some light exercise tracking, time and weather.
I think Pebble only recently worked again with iOS. I don't use iOS, I use AOSP-based OS. So for me, Apple Watch isn't an option, since it doesn't work well with that. Battery life and being able to replace the battery is also important to me.
When factories restart, not all of the workers who were working there before actually come back to work. Some of them stay in their hometowns or they get other jobs. This means that restarting the production line actually means retraining people on how to assemble the product. There is also an entire supply chain behind the assembly line that takes time to restart. Think of all the sub-components like plastics, metal components, etc. that need to be built at respective factories. It takes time to ship them to the primary factory for final assembly and test.
After the product gets assembled, there are several stages of testing, like gluing, environmental testing, final assembly test, and packaging, that take time as well. Then the product has to be shipped to the fulfillment center, packaged, labeled, and then shipped out. Each step time, and the process needs to completely re-start after CNY.
Thanks for explaining this. Would you estimate that the January units will be more likely to have issues than the later ones, since they'll be first off the line? Or will there be no changes to the components/process that might make the later units more reliable?
A good manufacturing process (with the appropriate level of testing) should result in yield variations, not quality variations. i.e. if the line is running less well for some reason, then you end up throwing more in the bin rather than shipping bad product.
Sorry to hijack, but are there plans to re-manufacture the Pebble 2 Duo in black?
I was one of the pre-orderers that was offered either a refund or a white version and chose the refund because I really had my heart set on the black and don't want a color screen.
I'm also an OG Pebble enthusiast, although sadly my old one is long gone.
Eric has made it clear that the Pebble 2 Duo was always going to be a limited run because it was made mostly of leftover components and there's no reasonable path towards making new copies of those components.
> Pebble 2 Duo is sold out! We are not making more.
Out of curiosity, what's the downside of color? The screen on the new watches is also substantially larger. AFAIK there's no discernible battery life penalty for the color watches (even with the larger screen).
It really is, I wish there were a version of the Time 2 that had a BW screen. I did manage to snag one of the Pebble 2 Duos before they sold out and I love it. The contrast and reflectivity is unbeatable.
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