Pebbling in colour

The Pebble Time is finally out! This fantastically simple, yet massively functional, little smartwatch is now shipping to the Kickstarter backers who pledged their renewed support to the company that produced the original Pebble.



I've been lucky enough to be beta testing a developer preview model of the Pebble Time, and have had it on my wrist for the last few weeks. I used this time to put together some animated watchfaces which make the most of the colour screen, and learn some C programming along the way!

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Path Time

An elegant animated watchface, with each digit built from curving paths. Animated minute transitions, and tap-triggered animation to improve readability under low light. Animations, line widths and colours can be customised.

Inspired by the watchface shown on the red Pebble Time Steel advertising images:

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Pop!

A fun, animated, easy to read watchface. Every minute the bubbles in the background pop, and a set of new ones appear (by default) in a new colour. Alternatively you can customsise the colour of the bubbles. Tapping or shaking the watch also triggers the animation.

Inspired by the watchface shown on the red Pebble Time advertising images:

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Arcturus

A colourful interpretation of the classic arc watchface design, with a Pebble Time-style loading animation and dynamic colour schemes. Colour schemes and whether or not to show the second hand can be customised.

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Disarray

A colourful interpretation of the classic pixel array digital watchface design, with loading animations, animated minute transitions and dynamic colour schemes. Colour schemes, pixel styles and animations can be customised.

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Software used:
CloudPebble: Watchface programming. CloudPebble is an online IDE for Pebble watchfaces and apps.
Notepad++: Server side HTML/Javascript for the watchface settings.

Pebble

My Pebble arrived! It may be a one of the smartest watches around, but it is also shiny and curvaceous. Explore the curves and reflections in my macro photos in this flickr set....

 Software used:
ImageJ: Photograph animation
UFRaw: Raw extraction

Small Polished Stones

• TL;DR Download this spreadsheet and look up your pledge date in the table. If you are really keen you can update the values in the sheet called "Production Data !UPDATE ME!" from this website to get a better estimate.

Loads of people are very excited about backing the Pebble smartwatch at Kickstarter, because if they gave a certain amount of money they would be given a Pebble once production began. The small polished stones will ship out in roughly the order that people backed the Kickstarter project. This makes it easy to guestimate when your Pebble will be made; all you need to know is the date you backed the Pebble project at Kickstarter (try searching your emails for "Backer Pebble")...


So how do you do it?

1
Pebble are giving updates on how production is going in near real time:
http://www.ispebbleshipping.com/
On the 30th Jan 2013 about 1500 Pebbles were made, taking the total to 8000 produced so far.

2
It is also easy to look up how many backers there were on each day the Kickstarter ran for:
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android/#chart-daily
For example by the 25th April 2012 40376 people had backed the project, most of these are in the queue to be sent a Pebble as a reward for supporting the project.

3
If you backed on the 25th April then it will take about "people in the queue in front of you (minus the pebbles already made) divided by production per day" days to get to your place in the queue. i.e. (40376-8000)/1070=30 days (I reduced the production rate to account for no production on weekends).

To make this a bit easier to calculate I made this spreadsheet. Just download it and look up the estimated production date based on your pledge date in the table. At the moment this is what it looks like as a graph:

The red cross is production as of today... There is still a long way to go!

Pebble are hoping to ramp up production to 2500 Pebbles a day. That will make a huge difference to estimated production dates, roughly halving the wait. To update the spreadsheets estimate fill in updated values from http://www.ispebbleshipping.com/ in the "Production Data !UPDATE ME!" sheet. All the estimated production dates will be recalculated automatically.

Disclaimer
This is just an estimate! And it is a pretty bad estimate based on very little data. Don't blame me if it's wrong.