Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Prototype Pebble Smartstrap in Public”.
My name is uh, thomas arnold and i’m in charge of developer relations at pebble. The smartwatch company pebble is a smartwatch launched on kickstarter in 2012. Uh really grown up from the maker movement started from an arduino and an lcd display when it was still cool before oled display were everywhere and uh. From that first kickstarter project. We shook the first pebble watch in 2013 and then just recently announced a new model. Pebble time, which has a color display, but still seven day, battery life compatible with ios and android and completely waterproof.
One of the key component of pebble is that it’s very customizable – and we want it here at maker faire to show how you can customize your own pebble, so we’re showing uh everyone how to take a picture and very quickly make your own watch face to show The time with the logo of maker faire or just a picture of your favorite project or your favorite friend and uh – that’s the simplest customization you can do, but we can go way beyond that. Uh we’re showing how you can control robots, using bluetooth, low energy, directly from your watch to your to your uh project, not going to your phone uh we’re showing how you can make old-school games right on pebble and we’re demoing them on an emulator here. And we have a bunch of other cool way to integrate with your home control, your thermostat or your lights around you – and this is all very easy, because all of the development tools are all available on the web.
It’S all free and there’s tons of examples for c and javascript, which the maker community love the robots are really cool design. This came up from the nodebots guy uh big credit to them for coming up. There is a very easy to build design very cheap. So basically, just two servos uh one pack of battery we’re using uh the light blue bean modules uh, which give us a ble connectivity to those robots, and we can control the value that we send to each of the servos. And so you know just using pulse coding, modulation and because the servers have been transformed to be continuous rotation servo, we can control the robots directly from the pebble. So in the pebble with the ble sdk, we have the ability to scan for ble, peripherals, connect to them, discover their characteristics and then take control of the robot. All the source code for the robot project is completely available on our website.
Uh. We have the source code for the robots, but also the source code for the pebble application. Of course, it’s very easy to do it again. I would say it’s a forty dollar budget to build a complete robot uh. The pedal itself is just 80 bucks and then uh it’s about an afternoon of work to build a robot and start playing.
And if you make several robots, then you can do what we’re showing here at maker faire and play soccer, or just try to see how many robots you can stack on top of each other one of the very exciting things in the new pebble time watch. Besides, the fact that it has a color display and a microphone is that it has a accessory connector on the back and that we have a completely open api for this accessory port. So from a pebble application, you can use the accessory port as a serial port and transfer information to and from accessories that will be mounted on the on the band of the user and we’re calling that smart straps. The connector is a four pin.
Uh connector. We have crown, we have plus five volt. The plus five volt allows the uh smart, strap to charge the watch, but also to power it uh and then uh.
We have uh one data, port uh, and so it’s a one wire serial bus. You can send and receive, but not do both at the same time, and the way we intend this to work is that you will send commands, listen for response, send another command, listen for response or in some specific use case like gps. You might be just listening continuously for incoming streams of data.
If you’re interested in building your own smart drive, you can go on our website and download 3d models of adapters that you can put on the back of your pebble to connect the smart trap accessory port to an arduino or any other performance. You’Ll just end up with a few wires that you can connect to any device. If you want something a little bit more polished and you want to be able to buy the pieces already made, we’re working with seed studio to come up with a pebble.
Smart, strap. Adapter that will allow you to connect the pebble smart, strap to the seed studio, shadow line of modules and the shadow line of modules. Are those really cool, really small arduino compatible module that you can chain with each other? So you can have a smart strap with a battery a vibration engine, a display, an arduino, a gps receiver, and then the only limit is going to be the space available on your wrist this year.
The smartwatch world is just exposing with many options available on the market, and i think people are just very excited to see that smart, strap, don’t have to be a completely finished and completely closed down product. They can still buy a smartwatch. That does everything you would want from a modern smartwatch, but also have it on an open platform compatible with ios and android that they can easily write apps on it, hike with it and both on the software and hardware levels. The software api for the smart, strap is still in development.
We have some early version that will be available very soon and we’re still very interested to get feedback from the community. So if you think you’re going to use this on your project, please go on our website. Take a look at the information, that’s available, it’s on developer.getpel.com, smartstraps and uh. If you have feedback comments, you’d like the api to be different now is the time to speak. We’Re listening, .