working-with-qemu

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Use when building, launching, debugging, or capturing screenshots of PebbleOS under QEMU.

coredevices By coredevices schedule Updated 6/2/2026

name: working-with-qemu description: Use when building, launching, debugging, or capturing screenshots of PebbleOS under QEMU.

Working with QEMU

PebbleOS can run under a custom QEMU version shipped with the PebbleOS SDK.

Configure & build

./pbl configure --board $BOARD
./pbl build

where $BOARD is any of the qemu_* boards:

  • qemu_emery
  • qemu_flint
  • qemu_gabbro

QEMU boards target a specific platform, e.g. qemu_emery targets the Emery platform, which is the platform used by Pebble Time 2.

Launch

./pbl qemu

The launched QEMU exposes:

  • Interactive QEMU monitor on the launching terminal (-monitor stdio)
  • Programmatic socket monitor (-monitor unix:build/qemu-mon.sock)
  • Serial console over TCP on localhost:12345 (console) and localhost:12344 (pebble-tool)

UART1 output is also captured to build/uart1.log.

Console

./pbl console

Requires QEMU to be running. Uses the TCP serial port to connect to the QEMU console, and provides a prompt for sending commands and receiving responses.

Screenshot

./pbl screenshot # defaults to build/screenshot.png
./pbl screenshot --screenshot-output /tmp/foo.png

Requires QEMU to be running. Uses the programmatic socket monitor to capture a screenshot of the QEMU display and save it to disk. Useful to validate or iterate on UI changes.

Interaction

Keyboard input is captured by QEMU, so you can interact with the PebbleOS UI. Keys can also be send programmatically over the socket monitor using the sendkey command. They key mapping is:

QEMU key PebbleOS key
left back
right select
up up
down down
Install via CLI
npx skills add https://github.com/coredevices/PebbleOS --skill working-with-qemu
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