Hexxeh's Blog

Hello libpebble!

A little while ago, I decided to look at what it'd take to talk to Pebble from a non-supported device, like say a laptop. One late night of hacking later, libpebble was born. It's essentially a complete (to my knowledge) implementation of the Pebble protocol.

You can do anything you'd expect including sending notifications to the watch, uploading new applications/firmware and receiving music playback commands from the music app on the watch. There's a sample application included for controlling Spotify or iTunes on OS X using your Pebble (demo). You can check the code out on GitHub here.

I'm super excited to see what the Pebble community does with libpebble! So far we've seen a C# implemention (thanks barometz!) and a hack to enable controlling Keynote using the Pebble. I imagine once the SDK for the Pebble arrives, this should become even more useful. I'd also like to say thanks to the many people who've contributed to libpebble, in particular RaYmAn for his help in figuring out the PutBytes part of the protocol.

Made something cool? Tweet me with a link and if it's awesome I'll retweet it on to share it with more Pebble fans. Happy hacking!

Spotify with Pebble

Firstly, huge thanks to the kind folks at @Pebble for sending me a unit to play with: you guys rock. I can't wait to get my hands the SDK. Also congratulations on pioneering animated GIF based customer support: it works surprisingly well.

As I tweeted earlier today, I managed to get Pebble to work with Spotify on my Nexus 4. I can't guarantee this is going to work for all devices and versions of Android, but I've verified it works on the Nexus 4 and the Galaxy Nexus both running Jelly Bean. I had issues with my Nexus One, but that's still running Gingerbread. If you're running something newer maybe you'll have more luck. So, without further ado, here's the quick guide to getting it working:

1. Uninstall Spotify from your device (you'll probably lose your sycned tracks/playlists, sorry!)
2. Install this modified version of Spotify
3. Install Media Button Router from the Play Store
4. Make sure your Pebble is paired and give it a shot!

Hopefully that works for you. Report success/issues to me @Hexxeh. You might find you have to tweak the settings in Media Button Router so that Spotify is the only app that recieves commands. Strangely enough, I also found that it still worked after I uninstalled Media Button Router, but YMMV.

Welcome to 2013

Since I'm launching this new design, let's begin with a few updates on various projects.

Raspberry Pi - Status: Hiatus

I'd still like to see Chrome on Raspberry Pi fly, but I don't have time for it at present, and I'm kinda at a dead end in terms of where to go with it. It's not dead, so I might have something to share with you in the future for this one.

Chromium OS Vanilla - Status: Active

Vanilla builds are continuing as normal, but please note that Flash/MP3/PDF aren't supported as these require plugins or codecs which I don't have a license to distribute. I can't help you install these for this reason, nor can I ship them for the same reason.

Chromium OS Lime - Status: Discontinued

I'm afraid to say Lime is discontinued and I'm no longer offering it for download or any support for it whatsoever: I have no plans for this to return.

Huge thanks to Geir Marius Kirkeberg Jansson for building this new design for me. If you're curious, this site is now running on Jekyll/Google App Engine.

I think that's about it. If I've forgotten something, tweet me and I'll post an update here