For a piece of wearable technology, Pebble has had a fairly “rocky” history. One of the most successful Kickstarters of its era, it went on to get acquired by FitBit, quietly shelved by them, then acquired by Google and open-sourced, where it’s now somewhat back in the hands of its original creator. Its new open source nature means that regular people can develop for these popular watches again, and [Coconauts] have developed a guide for these watches, new and old.

The original watches had to be coded using C, which is a fundamental language but one that generally isn’t used much in the modern world outside of embedded systems and other areas where efficieny is important. C does much less hand-holding than modern languages, so there are a number of things to keep an eye on when coding for these watches that languages like Rust, Go, and Python handle on their own. Regardless, the two-person team recently built a pair of apps for the Pebble platform as part of an app-making contest, one which notifies the user that the watch is charged to 80%, and another that shows an interactive kitten on the watch’s face.

Both of the apps are available from the Pebble app repository, and from there the source code can be found on respective GitHub pages if you’re looking for some examples to dust off old C skills. If you happen to have an old Pebble watch or always wanted one but didn’t want to deal with FitBit, now might be a good time to get them out and start tinkering around with it since it’s now in the open-source domain.