Recently I was approached by an architecture/design firm to help with an electronic install at a client site. The client had requested a system that interacts with users in the bathroom- “interacts” meaning, hassles them when they come and go.
(…) The system has three events- enter, exit, and “loiter”, and sounds in different folders on the USB drive will be played for each event, allowing users to change the sounds later if they wish.
Want a live tutorial on how to hack an Xbox by the guy who actually wrote the book on it?
If so, you should plan to attend what likely would be the nation’s first federal jury trial of a defendant accused of jailbreaking Xbox 360s, installing mod chips that allow the console to run pirated or home-brewed games and applications.
Celebrity geek Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, the designer of the Chumby and author of the 2003 title Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering, has agreed to testify for a southern California man charged under the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Eric Gregori from EMG Robotics recently linked me to a YouTube video originally posted on imxcommunity.org of a chumby One that he turned into a bipedal walker. This has got to be the most omgwtfbbq-cool robotics demo I’ve seen of the chumby One to date. Check it out. One small step toward our future robotic overlords…but hey, at least they’ll be open source. That might even be an improvement over what we have today.
Chumby Hacker Board – Beta. The Chumby Hacker Board is a cool single board Linux computer that has much of the same hardware as the famous Chumby One. It’s great for people who are experienced with Linux and want to have the power of a microcomputer with audio and video output while at the same time getting all the peripherals of a microcontroller such as analog-to-digital conversion, PWM outputs, sensors, bit twiddling, and broken-out GPIOs!
While we believe that the CHB is a fairly easy-to-use Single Board Computer, having a pre-installed OS on the included uSD card and drivers for the peripherals, it’s not designed for beginners! The board is best used by those with previous Linux experience. The good news is you don’t have to have another Linux computer to set up the CHB but you should have familiarity with shells and shell scripting, gcc, make, dmesg, etc. We also suggest having had some poking around with microcontrollers such as BASIC Stamp, Arduino, AVR, PIC, 8051, etc. So that when we say “i2c” and “not 5v tolerant I/Os” you can follow along
This is the Beta release, just for the hackers! The CHB is not in any way officially supported by Chumby Industries! Chumby has generously offered a Forum and Wiki where they will try to share information but there is absolutely no tech support or guarantee that the CHB will meet your project needs. Please do not contact Chumby directly either by email or phone for help with your CHB. If you have questions, please post to their forums to receive help from others and the occasional assistance from a CHB developer.
Whats so great about it anyhow? Well! We have a list!
Want some more information? Check out our Getting Started with the Chumby Hacker Board tutorial page which will show you how to get booted, connected and read data from the on-board triple-axis accelerometer in an evening. Wow!
Xorg (frame buffer version) lives on the NTSC output! I did the flashviewer to change output first, and needed to kill udev and restart it in the chroot along with hald, but I have mouse, keyboard, 720×480 screen. Maybe I’ll try firefox, or Quake 3 again… I still haven’t merged fedora into the chumby root. (Note: I also have the Xvnc running as a second X display at better resolution while the main one is running, but I hope to have a real remote desktop soon).
Chumby Hacker Board – Beta. The Chumby Hacker Board is a cool single board Linux computer that has much of the same hardware as the famous Chumby One. It’s great for people who are experienced with Linux and want to have the power of a microcomputer with audio and video output while at the same time getting all the peripherals of a microcontroller such as analog-to-digital conversion, PWM outputs, sensors, bit twiddling, and broken-out GPIOs!
While we believe that the CHB is a fairly easy-to-use Single Board Computer, having a pre-installed OS on the included uSD card and drivers for the peripherals, it’s not designed for beginners! The board is best used by those with previous Linux experience. The good news is you don’t have to have another Linux computer to set up the CHB but you should have familiarity with shells and shell scripting, gcc, make, dmesg, etc. We also suggest having had some poking around with microcontrollers such as BASIC Stamp, Arduino, AVR, PIC, 8051, etc. So that when we say “i2c” and “not 5v tolerant I/Os” you can follow along
This is the Beta release, just for the hackers! The CHB is not in any way officially supported by Chumby Industries! Chumby has generously offered a Forum and Wiki where they will try to share information but there is absolutely no tech support or guarantee that the CHB will meet your project needs. Please do not contact Chumby directly either by email or phone for help with your CHB. If you have questions, please post to their forums to receive help from others and the occasional assistance from a CHB developer.
Whats so great about it anyhow? Well! We have a list!
Want some more information? Check out our Getting Started with the Chumby Hacker Board tutorial page which will show you how to get booted, connected and read data from the on-board triple-axis accelerometer in an evening. Wow!
If you post in the Chumby forums with feedback drop us an email support@adafruit.com with your order # from your Chumby order from us and we’ll send you out a special gift!
Greetings beta users of the hacker board!
Due to strong demand on the beta hackerboard, we’ve got to push up the schedule for the final release of the board. Before releasing the board for final production, however, I’d like to collect some feedback from existing users of the board. Please do post any comments or feedback you have on the boards!
In addition, for the final version, I’m considering dropping the Arduino connector headers. The headers aren’t 100% compatible with Arduino (the hackerboard has fewer PWM’s available so certain motor controller boards don’t work exactly as they do on Arduino), and they are a bit tricky for assembly. Instead, we’ll work with our distributors to make and stock a custom breakout board that plugs into the 44-pin header on the top-side of the board which will provide equivalent functions to many of the existing Arduino boards. Also, we should be able to make a breakout that plugs into the 44-pin header which can provide an Arduino interface for those who absolutely require a connector-compatible Arduino header.
Have any of the users on this forum made use of the Arduino headers, and if so, how have they been useful to you?
Due to strong demand on the beta hackerboard, we’ve got to push up the schedule for the final release of the board. Before releasing the board for final production, however, I’d like to collect some feedback from existing users of the board. Please do post any comments or feedback you have on the boards!
In addition, for the final version, I’m considering dropping the Arduino connector headers. The headers aren’t 100% compatible with Arduino (the hackerboard has fewer PWM’s available so certain motor controller boards don’t work exactly as they do on Arduino), and they are a bit tricky for assembly. Instead, we’ll work with our distributors to make and stock a custom breakout board that plugs into the 44-pin header on the top-side of the board which will provide equivalent functions to many of the existing Arduino boards. Also, we should be able to make a breakout that plugs into the 44-pin header which can provide an Arduino interface for those who absolutely require a connector-compatible Arduino header.
Have any of the users on this forum made use of the Arduino headers, and if so, how have they been useful to you?
chumby is now offering a “hacker” board, which is the guts of the chumby One, but modified to be more hacker-friendly: it comes with three high speed USB host ports, uses the power connector from the Sony PSP (instead of the weird, hard to find connector on the chumby One) and incorporates a variety of headers, such as Arduino-style shield headers and a 44-pin breakout header that gives you access to a lot of digital I/O and some analog inputs. There’s even a four-directional switch on board and some LEDs so you can do quick hacks that don’t require a video display for user feedback. Speaking of the display, while this board doesn’t come standard with an LCD, it does provide composite video output via a 4-wire 1/8″ jack so you can, by using an iPod video cable, plug the chumby hacker board into any TV that supports a composite video input…
The board is priced at around $89. The goal of the beta program is to collect feedback from users who purchase the board to fine-tune the design and to figure out what I/Os and accessories make sense to bundle with the board. Like the Arduino, we don’t integrate a lot of features onto the mainboard itself (keeps base cost low). Instead, we’d like to make sure that adequate I/O resources exist for developers to hack in the peripheral module they require to complete their project — or for more enterprising developers to build their own flavor of peripheral board and sell their own accessory.
There’s a few resources available to get people started on using the boards: a forum for general support and questions, and a wiki containing links to datasheets, schematics, and other more permanent documentation that people will find useful. Adafruit also has available a snazzy hackerboard page with tons of info, well-documented tutorials, and nice photos to boot.
One other point of note about the hacker board is that you can install a native gcc toolchain on it, so you don’t need to configure/install a cross-compiler on your host PC to develop for it. Heck, it’s got a 454 MHz CPU and plenty of disk space, so why not? Adafruit has a tutorial on how to install the compiler using a downloadable self-extracting script and a USB dongle. I’ve also heard rumors that an OpenEmbedded port is coming to the board soon, so stay tuned.
If you do end up purchasing a board and participating in the beta, please do contribute to the fora and wikis with your feedback. As always, happy hacking!
Power supplies – How to power your Chumby Hacker board! Serial port – How to connect to the serial terminal port for shell access Compiler – Installing the Falconwing GCC toolchain Accessing i2c – Connecting to i2c chips including the on-board accelerometer!
Chumby Hacker Board – Beta. The Chumby Hacker Board is a cool single board Linux computer that has much of the same hardware as the famous Chumby One. It’s great for people who are experienced with Linux and want to have the power of a microcomputer with audio and video output while at the same time getting all the peripherals of a microcontroller such as analog-to-digital conversion, PWM outputs, sensors, bit twiddling, and broken-out GPIOs!
While we believe that the CHB is a fairly easy-to-use Single Board Computer, having a pre-installed OS on the included uSD card and drivers for the peripherals, it’s not designed for beginners! The board is best used by those with previous Linux experience. The good news is you don’t have to have another Linux computer to set up the CHB but you should have familiarity with shells and shell scripting, gcc, make, dmesg, etc. We also suggest having had some poking around with microcontrollers such as BASIC Stamp, Arduino, AVR, PIC, 8051, etc. So that when we say “i2c” and “not 5v tolerant I/Os” you can follow along
This is the Beta release, just for the hackers! The CHB is not in any way officially supported by Chumby Industries! Chumby has generously offered a Forum and Wiki where they will try to share information but there is absolutely no tech support or guarantee that the CHB will meet your project needs. Please do not contact Chumby directly either by email or phone for help with your CHB. If you have questions, please post to their forums to receive help from others and the occasional assistance from a CHB developer.
Whats so great about it anyhow? Well! We have a list!
Want some more information? Check out our Getting Started with the Chumby Hacker Board tutorial page which will show you how to get booted, connected and read data from the on-board triple-axis accelerometer in an evening. Wow!
3.5mm A/V Cable – 6′ – Often called ‘camcorder cables’ – these are standard 3.5mm audio cables that have 3 signals split out into RCA jacks. 6 feet long! Perfect for usage with your Chumby Hacker Board.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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