Willow Systems

2nd November 202016th June 2021

Writing a Pebble app in 2020 Part 2 – Installing the SDK

In part one of this 4 part series we covered the prerequisites you need to know to develop for Pebble watches. Part 2 will cover installing the SDK and Pebble emulator.

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15th October 20202nd November 2020

Writing a Pebble app in 2020 – Part 1

This series of posts is going to cover what it takes to write a simple application for the Pebble smartwatch. It will start from the absolute basics, and end with a working application written using JavaScript that can fetch information from the web.

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22nd October 201923rd October 2019

PinProxy V2 Released

Version 2 of the IF-This-Then-That (IFTTT) proxy for Pebble Timeline is now live, which brings some new, and requested, features as well as a new debugging tool!

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5th October 20195th October 2019

A quick and dirty dev portal for the rebble app store

The rebble app store now accepts new apps, thanks to the hard work of @Joshua and co, and he describes the process required to submit an app here. Currently though, it’s a bit of a manual process. To fix that, I’ve put together a dev portal of sorts, in which you upload your screenshots, pbw, and more, and the SPA will auto generate the yaml and wrap everything up nicely in a .zip file, which you can then send to @Joshua on the rebble discord to get your app on the store.

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21st August 201923rd October 2019

Integrate pebble with IFTTT once again!

If This Then That (IFTTT) is a popular service which lets you hook apps and services together. Before Pebble collapsed there was a pebble component which let you push pins to timeline. Now that rebble have brought timeline back, I’ve created a service which will once again allow you to create timeline pins via IFTTT.

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12th December 201813th December 2018

Decoding flight information from an undocumented endpoint on the in-flight WiFi

A few weeks ago I flew with Virgin to South Africa for work. Flights to South Africa from the UK are only ever overnight which for me is a shame, because I detest trying to sleep on an overnight flight. For anyone like me who wants to get on with other things whilst they fly, Virgin provide in flight WiFi – at a cost of £4.99 a device. I learned you had to pay only once the captive portal page kicked in. But seeing as I was already on the WiFi, I decided to do some poking around. Here’s what I found

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6th November 20186th November 2018

Using technology to up the spookiness this halloween

Often when you think IOT, it’s the security (or often the complete lack of) which makes it scary. This post, however, focuses on using some IOT tech for a different scary reason – Halloween.

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29th June 20182nd July 2018

Fingerprint scanners are not reliable proof of identity.

There’s a problem with mobile biometrics. More specifically, there’s a disconnect between how they should be used, and how they are being used. App developers are treating a fingerprint as though it though it will 100% surely assert that the user is who they say they are when in reality it can’t, it can only assert that they had access to the phone at one point or another. Looking at Android for specifics, let’s look at why the problem is there, and how it can be fixed.

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