A Pebble watchface that reads past a sleeve, and knows when you are near a bus. Most of the day it is a plain watch: the time, your heart rate and the weather, the date. Walk into a transit centre it knows and it becomes a countdown to the next departure. Flick your wrist at a stop and it counts down to the next bus from there.

the watch	at the transit centre	a flick at a stop

A cuff slides in from the wrist side and uncovers the outer edge first, so everything on the face hangs from that edge in order of how much you need it. The minute digits sit flush to it and survive a cuff that hides the hour. The modules and the date hang from it too, the number of the date on the edge itself: SEP 22. When there is a countdown it takes that edge and the date moves to the wrist side, first to go. A rail down the outer edge drains as the headway runs out, readable as a shape under any sleeve. Without a countdown the edge is bare, until a flick: then a hairline down it drains for as long as the flick's answer stays. On the right wrist the whole layout mirrors.

The time, two modules and the date. The modules are heart rate and the weather, drawn as icons in colour: the heart red, the sun yellow by night and orange by day, rain blue, clouds grey. A watch without a heart-rate sensor shows its battery in that slot. The theme is dark through the night and light by day; the night window is yours to set.

dark	light	captions instead

Three module slots take heart rate, steps, battery, weather or nothing, as captions (BPM 72, PARTLY 12°), as grey icons, or as icons in colour. A module with nothing to show — the weather before its first fetch — simply does not appear. Weather comes from Open-Meteo, which needs no key.

When rain is due within the hour, the quiet face gives it the column beside the modules and the date: RAIN IN over a big 15 MIN, rounded up to five minutes since the forecast comes by the quarter hour. Only then; dry, the column stays empty. It rides on the same weather check, so it needs no flick and sends nothing more. A flick's answer takes the place first. Not on the Classic, whose memory is spoken for.

The face knows some transit systems and every stop in them. Most are just that: stand at a stop, flick, and the face counts down to the next bus from it. One kind is more: a system built around a hub, a transit centre whose routes leave together, where the countdown comes on by itself. By default the phone checks where it is now and then, coarsely, and the face changes by the answer. Outside every known system nothing changes and it asks less often.

At the hub, in its hours, the countdown appears: minutes to the next departure, at the outer edge. Five minutes out the block goes solid and the watch buzzes once; at zero it reads NOW for a minute. The last minute counts in seconds. Routes that keep their own timetable get a second countdown as colour chips in the module band, with their departure's clock time small beside them, and their last minute counts in seconds too.

waiting	boarding	departing

A flick of the wrist anywhere inside the system asks the phone where it is, and the face answers with a countdown to the next bus from the nearest stop: the route's badge over the big minutes, the stop's name beside the modules, and how far it is when the fix puts you off it. The face never asks for high accuracy; it takes the phone's everyday fix at its word, and the nearest stop within that accuracy is yours, with its twin across the road and, at a station, every bay. The countdown is the hub's countdown, at any stop: solid at five minutes with a buzz, NOW in its minute, the last minute in seconds. When the bus goes it moves on to the stop's next bus, and so on until the day's buses are done, you flick somewhere else, or the phone's half-hourly look finds you well away from the stop. Nothing is checked meanwhile; it simply runs. A bus more than an hour off reads as its clock time, 1:21 PM, a size down; a bus another day's has its day beside the badge, TOMORROW or MON.

A stop with more than one route counts down to the soonest bus, whichever route. A second flick, within a few seconds of the answer, steps to the stop's next route, and again to the one after, round to the first; the countdown then follows that route until a flick answers anew.

a stop's countdown	off the stop	after the last bus

At the transit centre the countdown is the centre's already, so a flick there asks the one thing it can't say, the question asked standing in the bays: which buses are in? With the live feed, every route that leaves the transit centre that day is a badge on one line, in route order, solid in its colour where its bus is at a bay now and a grey outline where it isn't, and under it the loops' next departures, G and B, a line each, coloured the same way. Colour on that board means a bus is here and nothing else. With no live answer a flick there shows only its seconds, since nothing can be said about who is in. A Pebble Classic has no room for it.

At the yard, Connect's headquarters in North Logan where the buses sleep, a flick answers whether they are all back. The count takes the countdown's place, as big: 3 OUT under BUSES STILL OUT, counting every bus on a trip anywhere but the yard, detoured ones included, or a bare 0 under NONE ON TRIPS. With no live answer it is the stop up the road, as anywhere else.

For an hour after the day's last trip the yard needs no flick: the face shows the buses coming home by itself, the count in the countdown's place while any are still on a trip, then LAST TRIP ENDED over 12 MIN AGO, counting up, and a flick there says the same. The feed lists a bus only while it's on a trip, so none on one isn't all in: the last bus may still be driving back, ten minutes or so, and the minutes let the one at the gate judge. The hour is the timetable's, from the latest arrival of the services running that day (9:03 PM on weekdays, 6:59 on Saturdays), and the minutes run from when the last bus was last seen on its trip, or from the timetable's end if it was never seen. Only a phone last seen within a kilometre of the yard looks, every two minutes while buses are out; once none are, it looks once more five minutes after the last trip ended, for a bus that logged out by mistake and back in, and then not again, while the minutes count to 25 on the watch. Anywhere else nothing changes. A Pebble Classic has no room for the count. A system names its yard with --base lat,lon,metres, and the stop index then carries each service's end.

at the transit centre	light	the minute it leaves

Live times. Where the agency publishes GTFS-realtime, a flick also asks for predictions, and a predicted time carries a small arc in the accent: beside the badge over the countdown, above a badge at the hub. With live times the watch asks the phone to look again at five minutes and at one, so a late bus moves the countdown before it reads NOW on an empty road. A late bus moves to the minute it will really leave; a bus that will skip the stop drops out; a cancelled run drops out too; at the hub a bus is never shown leaving early, since buses lay over there and leave together. Elsewhere an early time stands, at a timepoint too: most early buses wait there, but a time held to the timetable costs you the bus the times one doesn't, where an early one costs only a wait. A time without the arc is the timetable's. At the hub the live feed also says which buses are in: a route whose bus hasn't reached the transit centre yet has its badge a grey outline, and solid in its colour once it's there.

Every flick, anywhere, shows the seconds the moment the watch feels it: under the time on the plain face, or, where the countdown is running, in the block itself, where 19 MIN becomes 18:42, what is truly left. With no stop within two kilometres that is all a flick shows: the gesture was heard, and nothing is taken away to say there is nothing.

The face knows two systems so far. Connect, the Cache Valley Transit District in Logan, Utah, is the hub kind: its routes leave the transit centre on the half hour and its G and B loops keep their own timetable. UTA, from Ogden to Provo, is the stops kind: TRAX, FrontRunner and the buses, with the rail lines by the names riders use (BLUE, RED, GRN, S, FR) and every bay of a station answering as one. Adding another is a GTFS feed; see Data below.

Outside those two, a flick can ask Transitous, the free, volunteer-run routing service built on every open transit feed it can find, for the stops near you and what leaves them, with live times where the agency publishes them. It answers as the face's own systems do: a countdown to the next bus from the nearest stop, a second flick for its next route. It is off unless you turn it on, and stays so: with it on, a flick takes a location fix wherever you are, sends it to Transitous rounded to about 100 m (and, at a stop with few departures in the first answer, the stop's id alone), and downloads about 50 KB a flick, more in the largest cities. Where the face knows a system it answers from that system's own timetable, and Transitous is never asked. Departure data from Transitous's sources, stops from OpenStreetMap.

The face began as a countdown for any fixed-headway service — a train every half hour, a shuttle every twenty minutes — and that is still here as a setting. Choose it and the countdown runs wherever you are, from a headway and a departure offset you set, with the hub's extras when you are at one.

From the Pebble app.

• Transit — automatic (default), countdown everywhere, or off. With it: how near the hub counts as at it, and a switch for the flick. Flick anywhere, with Transitous is off unless you turn it on; see above.
• Headway and departure offset — for the countdown: 30, 20 or 15 minutes, and minutes past the hour.
• Boarding buzz — one pulse at five minutes: at the transit centre (default), wherever the countdown runs, or off.
• Theme — dark at night and light by day, with the night window; or dark; or light.
• Accent — any colour; the rail, the colon and the boarding block.
• Wrist — left or right.
• Time format — the system's, 12-hour or 24-hour.
• Modules — three slots, and captions, icons or icons in colour.
• Units — °C or °F, metres or feet. Automatic, the default, goes by where you are: °F and feet in the United States, °C and metres elsewhere.

The watch never reads a feed. tools/transit.py reduces an agency's GTFS to what the phone needs: a file per stop with its departures, each naming the service it runs on, and an index with the agency's whole calendar — weekly patterns, dates added and dates taken away — so the phone works out which buses run on the day it is asked about, holidays and all, and a bus the agency writes as 24:53 runs at 12:53 the next morning. For a hub system it also writes the hub, its hours and the departures of the routes on their own timetable. The app's entry for each system goes in src/pkjs/transit.json; the stop files are served by GitHub Pages from the pages branch, which a nightly workflow rebuilds from the feeds and replaces whole, so old timetables never pile up in the history. The index carries a version of the timetable it was cut from, the same night after night until the agency publishes a new feed; the phone keeps each stop's file until that version changes, and after a flick keeps the stops within a few hundred metres of it, so a flick there with no signal still has its timetable. Only a flick asks for stop files; the background looks never do. The last 150 stops used are kept.

Each departure names its trip, from the agency's own GTFS, so live predictions can be laid over it. For Connect they come from the relay at live.cacherider.com, asked only for the stops being answered (?stops=id,id), at the flick and again at five minutes and at one. UTA's server turns relays away and its predictions name no stop, only each trip's place in it, so the phone reads UTA's own TripUpdate feed (about 170 KB, no key) and unpacks only the trips leaving the stop in the next ninety minutes, matched by trip and stop_sequence (--live-by feed). The live answer is an overlay and nothing more: the phone waits three seconds for it at most, drops it if the feed's own clock is more than ninety seconds old, and on any failure shows exactly the schedule it would have shown without it. A system names its relay or feed with --live-url, or has none.

A stop goes by the landmark the feed gives it where the agency writes them and one fits the watch's 23 characters (--landmarks): Connect's say what the bus announces, FIRE STATION, ECCLES ICE CENTER for "Across from Eccles Ice Center", since twins across a road are read as one stop anyway. Elsewhere, and where there's none, the address.

To add a system: add its feed to .github/workflows/transit.yml with a line running tools/transit.py (the feed, the agency, and a hints file for short names and badge labels), and ship the new transit.json in a release. A hub system also gives the hub's position and name and the routes that keep their own timetable.

Rectangular displays: aplite, basalt, diorite and flint (144×168) and emery (200×228). The layout is an edge-flush rail on a rectangle, so the round chalk and gabbro are not targeted.

aplite	diorite	emery	flint

On one-bit watches the accent becomes ink, the badges go solid, and the hairline under a stop name dots.

Every watch gives a face about 2 KB of stack, and the firmware's text renderer wants well over half of it for each call. So the face keeps almost nothing of its own beneath that call: each zone is laid out into static storage and its painter hands one run of text at a time to a single small leaf. Measured with the stack painted and read back, the deepest frame is 1800 bytes on basalt and on flint. Any new painter is written the same way and measured before it ships.

npm install
pebble build
pebble install --emulator basalt

The fonts are prebuilt. To regenerate them after changing a size or a character set in tools/genfonts.py:

~/.local/share/uv/tools/pebble-tool/bin/python tools/genfonts.py

Barlow Condensed SemiBold at fixed pixel sizes: 60px time (83 on emery), 44px countdown, 15px module values, 11px labels, 12px date, 9px captions. Digits are set tabular and labels tracked by drawing a glyph at a time. The transit centre's clock times are the one exception: Barlow Semi Condensed, the wider cut.

The SDK's font generator rasterises through the font's own hints, which scatter one- and two-pixel stems across the small sizes. tools/fontgen.py is that generator, vendored with FreeType's auto-hinter forced, and the .pfo blobs it writes ship as raw resources. The 9px caption font is the exception: it is drawn by hand, pixel by pixel, in tools/fonts/cap_9.json, with one-pixel strokes, even bearings and the digits in one cell, and tools/pfo.py writes it out; a rasterised 9px Barlow scattered two-pixel stems where it pleased. Icons are hand-placed 10×10 pixel patterns, scaled by nearest neighbour, so they invert with the theme and hold their shape on emery.

The face was designed with Claude Design and built with Claude Code.

Code under the MIT licence, see LICENSE. Barlow Condensed and Barlow Semi Condensed are under the SIL Open Font License, see resources/fonts/OFL.txt.