Hardware Podcasts

#006: Pebble’s Code is Free: Three Former Pebble Engineers Discuss Why It's Important (PART 2/2)

Coredump Sessions · 15 Apr 2025 · 1h 13m · Episode 7

What this episode covers

Brad Murray, former head of Pebble firmware, and Tomas, former developer evangelist at Pebble, discuss the risks and decisions behind building firmware for Pebble smartwatches. They detail a critical OTA update bug that nearly bricked nearly a million devices, which was recovered using a clever BLE-based stack overflow hack. The team also explains how they built a massive developer ecosystem through tools like CloudPebble and the Watch Face Generator, and how they optimized code size to backport Pebble 3.0 to legacy hardware using techniques like Link Time Optimization and bootloader rewriting.

Most relevant to

early-stage companies

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Pebble, Memfault
Products
CloudPebble, Watch Face Generator
Tools
QEMU, GCC, Clang
Also
Rust, Zig

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