[bunnie] has taken a few moments to show us how to turn our Chumby One into a 3g router. As it turns out, there is an easter egg that allows it to communicate with certain models of 3g dongles. There’s no GUI for this trick, so you’ll be doing most of your configuration via SSH. That shouldn’t be a problem for this crowd though. The Chumby One just got a lot more appealing.
[Atlantageek] sent in a missile launcher project that he threw together. For Christmas he received a Chumby One and a ThinkGeek USB Rocket Launcher as gifts (lucky dog). Neither of these toys are “played with” in the traditional sense as much as they become centerpieces of your next hack. In that spirit, [Atlantageek] immediately wrote a widget to control the launcher via the Chumby. The side effect of driving his cat bonkers was an unexpected bonus.
[bunnie] posted this pretty slick way of getting composite video out of a Chumby. The Chumby is an open source connectivity device that has already seen some decent hacking. This modification, done by [xobs] isn’t too difficult. It only requires patching into some pads on the motherboard and loading a custom kernel to support the external output.
[Andrew Rapp] sent in this project called Droplet. He’s been doing work with Xbees and Arduinos together and built this little toy. He describes it as “sort of like a Chumby”. It has built in services for Twitter, Google Calendar, News, Gmail, etc. You can download the full source code and plans on his site. His next planned revisions include possibly running it from a sheevaplug, making a nice case for it, and utilizing the unused pins of the arduino.
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Chumby unveiled their latest prototype. It’s a network connected digital picture frame that runs Flash widgets. Just like the current Chumby model, they’re publishing the software and hardware under a license designed to let you hack it. They let us borrow one of their open chassis evaluation kits to teardown and photograph. We’ve got more pictures, full specs, and the schematics below.
[bunnie] is one of the main people behind the Chumby, and even he can’t resist modding the things. He decided to outfit one with a larger LCD – using a stereo microscope to do the really fine pitch work – and a laser cutter to create a custom bezel for the finished piece. The new LCD is still a touchscreen and allows the Chumby to display 640×480 resolution over the stock 320×240. The mod requires a few parts, but the ultimate difficulty is caused by the surface mount connectors. If you’d rather have some software fun, you might want to check out [bunnie]’s Chumby wifi sniffer.
