Chumby is back

http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=9209

by unwiredben • 12 years ago

33 21 12 years ago

forum.chumby.com

mrbill• 12 years ago

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

georgemcbay5• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

tuzakey• 12 years ago

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.

georgemcbay5• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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?

georgemcbay5• 12 years ago

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.

chatmasta• 12 years ago

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?

CaveTech• 12 years ago

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.

peteforde• 12 years ago

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?

lnanek2• 12 years ago

Had to look it up on Wikipedia myself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby

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

unwiredben• 12 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

ChuckMcM2• 12 years ago

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.

bradleyland• 12 years ago

When rationalizing the price for the service, you can't include server costs only. Presumably, the market for the Chumby is not expanding, because they're not sold any more. This means that if the proprietor has any hope of continuing to make an offering, they must do so at a price point that recovers their current investment (sounds like there was a significant re-write), and can justify the time and effort they will have to invest going forward. The community will likely shrink over time, not grow.

I'd say $3/month is pretty conservative. How many Chumby users are there? How many will make the leap to the paid plan? Remember that he's offering the free tier.

51Cards• 12 years ago

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.

chrismorgan• 12 years ago

Oh? http://files.chumby.com/blocked.html?27.32.227.98

Daviey• 12 years ago

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.

Chumby is back

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