Month: December 2025

The New Pebble: Now 100% Open Source

December 1, 2025 by 18 Comments

The Pebble was the smartwatch darling of the early 2010s, a glimpse of the future in the form of a microcontroller and screen strapped to your wrist. It was snapped up by Fitbit and canned, which might have been the end of it all were it not for the dedication of the Pebble community.

Google open-sourced the OS back in January this year, and since then a new set of Pebble products have appeared under the guidance of Pebble creator [Eric Migicovsky]. Now he’s announced the full open-sourcing of the current Pebble hardware and software stack. As he puts it, “Yesterday, Pebble watch software was ~95% open source. Today, it’s 100% open source”.

If you’re curious it can all be found in repositories under the Core Devices GitHub account. Building your own Pebble clone sounds cool, but perhaps the real value lies instead in giving the new Pebbles something the original never had, an assured future. If you buy one of the new watches then you’ll know that it will remain fixable, and since you have the full set of files you can create new parts for it, or update its software. We think that’s the right way to keep a personal electronic device relevant.

If you want a new Pebble they have a store, meanwhile read some of our previous coverage of its launch.

Sensor Package Aims To Predict Acid Rain

December 1, 2025 by 6 Comments

Acid rain sucks, particularly if you run a fancy university with lots of lovely statues outside. If you’d like to try and predict when it’s going to occur, you might like this project from [Mohammad Nihal].

When rain is particularly acidic, it’s usually because of the combination of sulfur dioxide or nitrogen dioxide and moisture in the atmosphere. This combination ends up making sulfuric acid or nitric acid that then falls to the ground as precipitation. The low-pH rain that results can harm ecosystems, melt statues, and just generally give everyone a hard time.

[Mohammed] decided to try and predict acid rain by building a simple device based on an Arduino Nano. It records SO2 levels with an MQ-136 gas sensor, and NO2 levels with an unspecified MEMS-based sensor. There’s also a DHT11 temperature & humidity sensor in the mix, which is important since moisture content plays a role. The Arduino reads these sensors and uses a simple predictive algorithm to create an “Acid Rain Risk Score” that is displayed on a 16×2 character LCD. It’s all wrapped up in a fun 3D printed enclosure that looks like a cloud.

There are some limitations to the device. Namely, it doesn’t necessarily have a great read on atmospheric SO2 and NO2 levels in the atmosphere, particularly at altitudes where rain is formed, because the sensor sits inside the device indoors. However, the basic concept is there, and improvements could certainly be made with some upgrades and further research.