The Chumby as an orbiter?

[desmarch]

Has anyone tried to use the Chumby (http://www.chumby.com/) as an orbiter.
It seems it has all the prerequisite while being open source and cheap.
Your opinion would be appreciated.

[Matthew]

The Chumby looks like it could be an Orbiter if it had more RAM, but its own Linux OS/apps would have to be wiped in favor of an LMCE Orbiter (probably netboot).

But it also looks like it would be a nice replacement for a SliMPlayer, with a featureful $180:

    *  3.5" LCD color touchscreen
    * iPod® support
    * Two external USB 2.0 full-speed ports
    * 350 MHz ARM processor
    * 64 MB SDRAM
    * 64 MB NAND flash ROM
    * Stereo 2W speakers
    * Headphone output
    * Squeeze sensor
    * Accelerometer (motion sensor)
    * Leather casing
    * AC adapter included
    * Wi-fi connectivity
    * Access to the free Chumby Network
    * Over-the-air software updates

I'm impressed they can sell something like that for so little, without locking in subscriptions to their Chumby network service. I'd like to buy a version without the squeeze sensor, accelerometer, or tiny speakers/amp, which seems like a device that could cost about $100 as an audio streaming client. I don't know of another Linux machine that can also host a USB Bluetooth dongle for presence and BT speakers.

[teedge77]

uhhh....a touch screen pillow? or the bastard son of a headrest?

[darrenmason]

I had the same idea a while back - but they are only shipping them to the US so I forgot about it.

[DeadPenguin]

Funny. I saw one of these on the Make mag site a couple weeks ago, and have been pricing them on Ebay.  Neat little device and its open and Hackable.

[billytwowilly]

It's gotta be plugged in at all time... This would be interesting if it had a battery and could go into sleep mode....

[ytuxedo002]

I would like to Bump this post.  I currently have a chumby and love it.  BUT! i would LOVE it more if i could use it in conjuction with LMCE.  Anybody got any ideas??

[darrenmason]

I have got one on the way and plan to try and get an orbiter on it.

Have you tried a web orbiter on it?

[tschak909]

that is the most bizarre...
....
...

i find myself laughing, yet...strangely drawn to it....

it's kitch, and wtf!? in the same breath.

-Thom

[darrenmason]

So what colour did you get Thom

[ytuxedo002]

I have got one on the way and plan to try and get an orbiter on it.

Have you tried a web orbiter on it?

Darren,

Did you finally get the Chumby?

Get it to work as an orbiter yet??

[darrenmason]

No havn't got it yet. Tracking said it left the US last week so sometime this week....

[darrenmason]

Update:

Well the thing arrived ( not long after the above post ) but I have just had it sitting doing whatever a standard Chumby does

Found a bit of time over the last few days so thought I would have a look at what it takes to get an orbiter running on it.

At first I thought of compiling natively for it (similar to Nokia 770 build) but using the Proxy Orbiter was also worth a shot.

There are still a lot of dependencies to build an orbiter so I decided to look into the proxy orbiter.

The proxy orbiter seems to work by rendering an obiter to a bitmap and receiving "press" events at co-ordinates on the bit map which it turns into DCE speak. So anything that can request an image over http and work out the x/y co-ordinates of each mouse press should be able to work with it.

The chumby has a natively compiled flashplayer which run flash 8. I figured that flash should easily be able to meet the requirements I mentioned above - problem is I have never written an flash programs and really don't intend to pay six or seven hundred dollars to get a dev environment. There is however an open source alternative and so I have been looking into  that.

And after some quick learning and hacking I now have linuxMCE orbiter running as a flash program on the Chumby
Performance is good and it has run faultlessly so far.
Resolution is 320x240 and it is running UI1 on its little screen which is just usable with my fat fingers.

So far there is a lot of hacks and hardcoding so I need to clean this up a bit before I make it available for testing. Also need to address refreshes as it currently only refreshes after you press the screen - so if the orbiter updates it will not push this out. This does not seem to impact usability too much though.
This is a standard chumby widget so it could just be added to a channel - however I would like it so that if you pick up the chumby and shake it it starts the orbiter and then if you shake it again it goes back to standard control panel. I think that this should be doable.

Once I clean up the code, I will post some wiki pages and the code/swf file for others to test.
(btw. This will work on anything that has a flashplayer and network connectivity)

Regards
Darren

[seth]

 
This is great news. I am getting 2 of these little devices. Having an orbiter on my headboard, is a wonderful concept. I look forward to your code release, and If you ned any testing done... Let me know.

Should have them in the next couple of weeks.

Great Work,

Regards,

Seth

[ytuxedo002]

Great work Darren.  Can't wait to see this widget.  I've had my chumby since my wife bought for me for christmas.  And i've been waiting for somebody to "break it in", so to speak.  Being a remote seems like the perfect next step.  Keep us updated and thanks again!!