One owner turned his Chumby into a toy car.
Courtesy Bunnie Studios The Chumby is small, cheap, equipped with an accelerometer, slightly squishy and endearingly ugly. It's a hacker's dream come true.
Since its general public release in February, the compact WiFi internet appliance with a hackable operating system has garnered high praise from early users, many of whom can't seem to resist anthropomorphizing the leather-clad device. But the Chumby is also seducing a growing number of software and hardware hackers who are bending it to their own whims.
"The key part of the Chumby's appeal is that it's an embedded-hardware device that's open," says Andrew Walton, a seasoned Linux programmer and Chumby software hacker who moderates his own Chumby-hacking forum. "Everyone's used to open source software, but with open source hardware it's a whole new game. When you combine them both, Chumby hackers can literally do anything they want."
Currently, more than 600 developers have built Flash widgets for the Chumby, and around 200 have shared those widgets on the Chumby Network, according to Chumby Industries, the San Diego company that sells and licenses the devices. While it's hard to quantify, the company guesses that there are now several dozen active widget developers.
Generally speaking, the Chumby is meant to be a highly specialized second screen catering to those with acute internet addictions. It's equipped with WiFi, so the Chumby can deliver whatever channels of personalized content a user wants, including news, music, weather and photos. It also comes with Adobe's Flash, a programming platform that's widely used on the web to create everything from interactive banner ads to video players to games. Flash is flexible enough that developers can construct virtually any useful widget they can imagine. And because it's already familiar to many web developers, the Chumby is accessible to many potential programmers.
If you ask Duane Maxwell, vice president of software development and a founder of Chumby Industries, this openness was all part of the plan.
"The whole business model (for the Chumby) was developed around a device that's literally made to be hacked," he says.
The founders include Xbox hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang, which may partly account for the device's hacker-friendliness.
The result was a model that centered on catering to and encouraging people's innate modding instincts.
"We found that if you open up your device, people will be in the business of enhancing it," Maxwell says.
That model is technically not open source, because the distribution of Adobe's Flash player is bound to the Player Distribution License and subject to Adobe's approval. But it's definitely "open."
The Chumby client is an evolving Linux-based platform. Apart from the Flash player, its architecture is largely open source. Hardware hackers have been particularly drawn to what's known as the "chumbilical," a cable that plugs into the Chumby. This cord has a daughter card equipped with a USB port, an SBI (SCSI-based interface) bus and outputs for the Chumby's "squeeze sensor," speaker, battery and microphone. Through this connector, developers can add peripherals, such as thermometers (making it effectively a tiny weather station) and more.
The Chumby is designed in a way such that its core electronics can be easily separated from its outer shell. This lets Chumby owners create that exact look they want. Some enterprising crafters have already stuffed the screen into teddy bears and footballs and even exquisitely designed wooden cases.
Carlos Camargo, an assistant engineering professor at the National University of Columbia, has taken to hacking both the Chumby's hardware and its software. His current project, which centers on constructing a Chumby-based vehicle-tracking system, will let the Chumby communicate with a cellular modem and with GPS to measure the driving habits of people in Columbia.
"The Chumby's accelerometer will be a good driving indicator, storing the mean speed and acceleration and the strong changes in the acceleration," says Carmargo, who is currently writing the source code and developing his user interface with Qt application-development framework.
Indeed, with so many sensors and potential applications for the Chumby, it's often hard to keep track of the myriad projects developers, hackers and crafters are embarking on, Maxwell says.
"Honestly, a lot of the time we have no idea," he says. "We put the nutrients out there to see where life spontaneously grew and it's really hard to predict where that will go."
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