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(ex Pebbler here) Pebble had - I believe - the most stable Bluetooth stack out there. This was due to two things: 1. Extremely talented Bluetooth engineers. Ch

by fra 4y ago

(ex Pebbler here) Pebble had - I believe - the most stable Bluetooth stack out there. This was due to two things: 1. Extremely talented Bluetooth engineers. Chris and Martijn were second to none. 2. Very good diagnostics tools built in house. When a user complained of connectivity issues, we could take a snapshot of the state of their Bluetooth stack. This gave us amazing insights into what was going wrong- more often than not we found that iOS and Android were doing something unexpected (we had lots of workarounds for their bugs). FWIW a few of us went on to start a company to build more of those hardware debug tools: Memfault (W19).

xeromal 4y ago
Thanks for building something I loved for many years. I rocked my round pebble until the screen finally died. Such a lovely decice
usrusr 4y ago
Now how can we get the all-buying eye of the Garmin acquisition strategy team to look in that direction? If Memfault ever want to end the standalone external tool supplier gambit and return to being in-house expertise, sounds like they could be very useful there. Not because Garmin's BT is so terrible (it has improved a lot but still far from perfect), but because Garmin seems to be the smallest living company that still builds their own stack down to the lower levels instead of hitching a ride on something like an Android fork.
- jesse_cureton 4y ago
  Ex-Garmin engineer here. There are pockets of the company that use Android, and a bunch of the larger-scale systems have moved to using embedded Linux with Yocto. The proprietary RTOS that runs on the watches is a super cool embedded system dating back to the earliest days of the company. It grew across all the product lines - watches, nav units, aviation equipment, marine chartplotters/sensors, etc. I remember once stumbling on some code written in the very early days by an engineer who went on to be the CEO while I was there. It was a fun system to work on, and had an impressive amount of code sharing at the OS-level across platforms as tiny as Cortex M0 systems up to large multi-core ARM SoCs from TI and other vendors.
  - usrusr 4y ago
    Thanks for the glimpse! My personal Garmin angle is cycling, which eventually that also "infected" my left wrist. When they first came under pressure in cycling from leaner competitors that are deep into the outsourcing game, I was interested to the point of pre-ordering. But since then I've learned more about the company and have come to respect them in an entirely unexpected way, for being that almost anachronistic twentieth century remnant that just keeps staying in the high tech innovation game. The mix of continuity and openness to change you describe sounds just right for that.

by fra 4y ago

xeromal 4y ago

Thanks for building something I loved for many years. I rocked my round pebble until the screen finally died. Such a lovely decice

usrusr 4y ago

Now how can we get the all-buying eye of the Garmin acquisition strategy team to look in that direction? If Memfault ever want to end the standalone external tool supplier gambit and return to being in-house expertise, sounds like they could be very useful there. Not because Garmin's BT is so terrible (it has improved a lot but still far from perfect), but because Garmin seems to be the smallest living company that still builds their own stack down to the lower levels instead of hitching a ride on something like an Android fork.

jesse_cureton 4y ago
Ex-Garmin engineer here. There are pockets of the company that use Android, and a bunch of the larger-scale systems have moved to using embedded Linux with Yocto. The proprietary RTOS that runs on the watches is a super cool embedded system dating back to the earliest days of the company. It grew across all the product lines - watches, nav units, aviation equipment, marine chartplotters/sensors, etc. I remember once stumbling on some code written in the very early days by an engineer who went on to be the CEO while I was there. It was a fun system to work on, and had an impressive amount of code sharing at the OS-level across platforms as tiny as Cortex M0 systems up to large multi-core ARM SoCs from TI and other vendors.
- usrusr 4y ago
  Thanks for the glimpse! My personal Garmin angle is cycling, which eventually that also "infected" my left wrist. When they first came under pressure in cycling from leaner competitors that are deep into the outsourcing game, I was interested to the point of pre-ordering. But since then I've learned more about the company and have come to respect them in an entirely unexpected way, for being that almost anachronistic twentieth century remnant that just keeps staying in the high tech innovation game. The mix of continuity and openness to change you describe sounds just right for that.