
Chumby is back - unwiredben
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=9209
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peteforde
I find it frustrating that the blog post does not explain what a Chumby is.

Neither does the chumby.com homepage.

Incredibly, neither does the item description in the Chumby store.

I'm sure that this announcement is great news for someone, but is Chumby
supposed to be a well-kept secret? Why make it so hard to discover what a
Chumby does and for who?

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lnanek2
Had to look it up on Wikipedia myself:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby)

I do vaguely remember it now. Surprised he doesn't just do a Chumby 2 on
kickstarter.

~~~
unwiredben
Producing new hardware would probably require a bit of renegotiating, and
there are likely enough devices out there either in new old stock or unplugged
to satisfy demand.

I'd love to see a Chumby distribution for the Raspberry Pi, for example, to
support something newer and in production, but that would require figuring out
a way to legally license FlashLite from Adobe again.

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ChuckMcM
Interesting, I've got 3.5 Chumbies :-) This is not a good thing for me :-(

The Chumby was a product from Bunnie Studios which was an ARM system with a
touch screen, embedded is a bean bag kind of case. It had an application which
is basically a flash player (yes on ARM, the only one I know of these days)
and it would cycle between flash applications on a "channel." Some times it
would cycle through to an advertisement.

It has an accelerometer, speaker, 320 x 240 x 16 touch screen, a couple of USB
ports and a wireless network connector. You can wire up a USB serial port to
the console if you have something like the AdaFruit FTDIFriend board.

It very much was the classic case of something "before its time" and the
business model was kind of dicey. If you didn't want commercials you were out
of luck. Once the company shut down they left a server up serving the one App
I really liked, "Space Clock" which was a clock like you might see on a Star
Trek universe ship (it has a very LCS look to it).

The site has been revived and a new business model has been put in placed, $3
per month subscription for the ability to run 'apps' on your Chumby. I presume
it no longer shows ads.

Its sad for me because it has a really crappy clock app now that runs instead
of the space clock, and that is going to force me to finish up my OS
replacement. The thing is based loosely on the old Beagle board and much of
the things that run on that board run on the Chumby. In particular there is a
Ubuntu image for it.

I get the subscription thing, but I don't get the price. For $36/year you can
run quite a bit of server. A single droplet ($5/month) can serve up several
thousand Chumbies (they don't make I/O requests all that often). $3 a year
would have made more sense to me, even $5 a year. Anything more than $12 a
year and I'm just not going to go there.

The reason I have 3.5 is that the .5 is the 'Chumby Guts' option that Adafruit
offered for a while. It was all of the parts, minus the squishy case. At $99
for the parts it was a really good deal for a small ARM linux system with a
touch screen. I wish them luck, and I'm glad they are back, but I think they
need to rethink that price.

~~~
fencepost
I think there's a little bit off in your summary of the post-demise events,
but not much. After Chumby closed its doors someone (anonymous investor?) kept
paying the server bills for quite a while, presumably as they attempted to
find a buyer for the remains including the customer base. Meanwhile one or
more former staff (Duane) kept things going on the forums and could deal with
a few things on a volunteer basis as his time allowed.

Once it became clear that a purchase wasn't going to happen, Duane was able to
purchase it for what I suspect was a fairly small amount of money. That's the
point where the change over to "Space Clock" happened, because as it turned
out there were some international addresses chewing down amazing amounts of
bandwidth, etc. some of them for no clear reason.

I haven't kept track, but at one point there was a USB-bootable local version
of the Chumby software available for download, though apps were problematic. I
don't know if it improved beyond the level of "choose your apps by putting the
files in the right place and editing GUID-like values in a config file" or
not.

My wife still uses her Chumby as a clock, but I was actually thinking about
stealing it from her so I can use it as a simple streaming audio alarm clock -
that functionality is built right in.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I've been in contact with Duane, I would be really curious as to what the
international IP's were doing exactly. One of my Chumbys lived briefly on the
Internet and a number of things tried to hack it but for the most part it has
been reasonably safe. I did use the SSH option to go in and get a better
firewall running on it.

Like you I think the Chumby is a great 'viewer' into things digital. Whether
it is the time, my calendar, or whatever. My long neglected project is a
Ubuntu with a DirectFB driver and the QT4 widget set. I'm going to have to see
what it will take to bring that back. Robert Nelson has an excellent
toolchain/process for building images for these things and ARM Linux has
gotten a lot better in the last half decade.

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georgemcbay
This sort of dedication (in addition to him being a great developer, hacker
and all around swell guy) is why anyone would be lucky to work with/for Duane
Maxwell.

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chatmasta
What is this company? The linked blog post does little to enlighten me, and
even after reading the chumby.com homepage I'm still unsure. It looks like
they sell hardware? For what purpose?

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CaveTech
They used to sell hardware devices, similar in design to a digital picture
frame. These were internet connected devices that could display different apps
or feeds.

They were kind of a mix between Tablets and Dashboards.

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tuzakey
The Chumby was cool 4 years ago... When the Chumby services started getting
flaky as their business died I replaced mine with an Android tablet in a sound
dock. The Android tablet is more reliable, has more apps, and doesn't turn
into a worthless brick when the internet goes down. I still have the Chumby in
a box somewhere, maybe now that services are back up I can sell it and recover
some of my cost.

~~~
georgemcbay
The use case for chumbies was intended to be different than Android apps in
the sense that you have "channels" of rotating information (photos, tweets,
whatever) that you can consume in a non-interactive manner (most of the time)
which doesn't really map well to Android apps.

While I'm an avid Android user (phone & multiple tablets and even do Android
programming as my current "day job"), I still think there is room in the world
for the chumby "vision" though if it were to work long term it would be better
served by eventually moving the system off of Flash and decoupling the service
and apps even more from the existing hardware (it would be better as a
software platform that ran on whatever, including (for example) raspberry-pi
boards which are in some ways spiritual descendants of the chumby hardware).

disclosure: I worked for chumby until it died.

~~~
madeofpalk
Well, the reason Android (or iPad) isnt suitable for this is the right app
just doesnt exist yet.

Wouldnt Chumby just be more suited to make a $5(expensive!) app for iOS and
Android (hell, make it a webservice) that incorporated the previous Chumby
feeds?

~~~
georgemcbay
We did produce a chumby Android app prior to the company going out of
business, I think it still exists.

Putting it on iOS was a no-go because of iOS' refusal to support Flash. Even
today it would still be kind of iffy on iOS unless it was all based on HTML
and JavaScript since AFAIK that's the only way (via UIWebView) that Apple will
allow any app to be as dynamic as a real chumby control panel app would have
to be, which then becomes a bit of a problem as far as backward compatibility
to existing chumby hardware goes since they are pretty CPU/RAM starved for web
stuff.

But you're right in that (as I mentioned in the other post) the system would
be better served by being a multiplatform software play in the future rather
than being stranded on old ARMv5 devices running Flash Lite.

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51Cards
Look up Sony Dash, it was Sony's version of the Chumby. Got it for free with a
notebook purchase and it's still running beside my bed however I stopped using
most apps long ago. Loved the concept but the execution left a lot to be
desired. CPU could never make the flash based apps feel snappy. Still makes a
sweet alarm clock though.

One app would load content from any url you specified. Tied it to a script
that summarized the status of our servers so I could monitor it anytime.

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Daviey
I desperately tried to buy a Chumby when they came out. "Only shipping to US!"
.. Fine, ok - whatever... I'll have it mailed to a friend and pick it up from
them.

"Oh, trying to use a non-US Visa/Mastercard?? No no no"

.. Then gave up. Trying to throw money at a company that won't take it, they
went bust. Not surprised.

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mrbill
woah. I might still have a couple of the 3" and 8"(?) units around still in
the box...

~~~
georgemcbay
I still have a few unboxed insignia infocasts (3 and 8) and a few drawers full
of Chumby Ones, a couple of Chumby 8s and a few chumby classics, in addition
to some old prototype boards and even a Sony Dash with sshd enabled (rare,
because Sony locked down the retail hardware).

Even while the chumby service was down I would often pull these out to use as
special purpose devices (eg. mpd servers for net radio), they are still pretty
good small linux boxes that go great with Go development.

~~~
zdw
I too have a few Infocast 8's sitting around. My Chumby One (white plastic)
died a while ago (reboot loop) unfortunately.

Are you aware of what the best current linux firmware is for the Silvermoon
(8") platform? The OpenEmbedded versions I've seen are fairly old released
from when the devices first went on sale, and I'd love to make use of them.

~~~
georgemcbay
Unfortunately I don't think there is a newer version of the kernel than that,
at least not that anyone has released (it is possible xobs/Sean Cross might
have code for a newer build laying around somewhere, but if so I'm not aware);
not long after that version was baked the layout of the ARM platform in the
linux kernel diverged a lot and the older kernel version was from a time where
hardly any of the SoC vendors (including Marvell) were getting anything into
the mainline.

It would theoretically be possible to get a 3.x kernel up by forward-porting
the divergent patches between that OE kernel and the linux kernel version from
that time, but I'm not aware of any current working code for that. Due to the
changes in the kernel, it wouldn't be trivial to do.

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chrismorgan
Oh?
[http://files.chumby.com/blocked.html?27.32.227.98](http://files.chumby.com/blocked.html?27.32.227.98)

