Introducing Pebble Tool 4.0

I am pleased to today announce that version 4.0-rc4 of the pebble tool is now available. The key new feature is a new paradigm for dealing with firmware and SDK versions. This makes it much easier to deal with differing SDK versions, or to test code on multiple (emulated) firmware versions.

A note: while the tool is now at version 4.0, the SDK, firmware and mobile apps will not be following. Pebble tool versioning is now completely independent of the rest of the Pebble ecosystem.

Managing SDKs

The pebble tool now manages SDKs for you, without you needing to download and install the entire SDK manually each time. The first time you need an SDK, the latest one will be automatically installed for you. After that, you can use the SDK operations that live under the pebble sdk subcommand.

To see a list of available SDKs, use pebble sdk list:

katharine@kbrmbp ~> pebble sdk list
Installed SDKs:
3.7 (active)

Available SDKs:
3.6.2
3.4
3.3
3.2.1
3.1
3.0
2.9

You can install any SDK using pebble sdk install, like so:

katharine@kbrmbp ~> pebble sdk install 3.6.2
Installing SDK...
Do you accept the Pebble Terms of Use and the Pebble Developer License? (y/n) y
Downloading...
100%[======================================================]   1.40 MB/s 0:00:01
Extracting...
Preparing virtualenv... (this may take a while)
Installing dependencies...
Done.
Installed.

You can switch between active SDKs using pebble sdk activate <version>, like pebble sdk activate 3.7. Once you activate an SDK, it will be used for all build and install commands.

Switching on the fly

A number of commands now take an optional --sdk flag, which will override the current active SDK. This enables you to easily run one command with a different SDK version — for instance, compiling with 3.6.2 and then running on 3.7:

katharine@kbrmbp ~> pebble build --sdk 3.6.2
# ...
katharine@kbrmbp ~> pebble install --emulator basalt --sdk 3.7
# ...

This is supported by pebble build as well as any command that supports --emulator. Additionally, you can now run emulators for multiple SDKs simultaneously by passing different values for --sdk.

Benefits

Beyond the obvious benefit of easier SDK management, the new system also produces much smaller SDKs. Each SDK used to be a 38 MB download, which decompressed to 143 MB, plus another hundred megabytes for the toolchain. Most of this is now downloaded only once, as part of the initial pebble tool setup. After that, each SDK is only a 2 MB download, which expands to 4 MB on disk.

The new pebble tool can also alert you to new SDKs as they become available, enabling you to install them with a single command.

Try it out!

To try out our new pebble tool, read the instructions on the SDK Beta page.

Please contact us if you run into any issues installing or using pebble v4.0, or if you have any feedback. You can also frequently find me on Slack Discord — join us!