Your daily dose of Chumby love!

Chumby Industries have just announced that they are releasing a bleeding edge control panel. This is a great idea, and something I know lots of people will be want to try.

Welcome to the Control Panel 2.6 Beta. As part of our ongoing development of new functionality for the chumby, we’re making some versions of some software available for access by users that wish to be more on the “bleeding edge”.

These releases are not production quality - they have known bugs, they may be missing some functionality, and often they do not have final art. In some cases some functionality may actually be added and removed during the process, so the feature set you see at any point may not be in the final version.

These releases are not for the timid - while it’s extremely unlikely that they will “brick” a chumby, it’s possible that some files might be corrupted and require some manual intervention through SSH or resetting the device to factory defaults. These releases are also not officially supported by the Customer Service department - you should make your comments and reports on the Chumby Forum in the Beta Software section. Be sure to report precisely which version you’re using - the version number is in the upper right of the Control Panel main screen - and the steps to reproduce any problems so that we can recreate them internally.

This guy sure likes the Chumby logo!

If you don’t know much about the whole Chumby thing, you might wonder why blog about “just a device”. A good question, but Chumby is not just a device. Chumby is a low end electronic consumer device, but it’s also the first (to my knowledge) “always-on” wi-fi enabled Internet based device to be used as a household or office appliance.

The thing that makes Chumby so interesting is the “openness” supported by the people at Chumby Industries. You can get the source code that runs the device, as well as the schematics for the hardware. The people at Chumby Industries have even blogged and shot video showing much of their journey from concept to production.

There is already a growing community around Chumby, and for a device that has not even been publicly released yet, it’s unprecedented.

We’re always hearing about ambient and ubiquitous computing, and we’re now seeing applications (which are your typical widget or gadget) designed for use not just outside the browser, but outside the desktop altogether. Being the first device of it’s kind in this space is interesting in itself, but that combined with the openness I mention above makes Chumby not only extremely interesting but truly fascinating.

I think we will see many other Chumby blogs in the future, after all Chumby is already a celebrity in the blogosphere.

It seems to be the craze to “unbox” gadgets and goodies, so here is the “Chumby Unboxed” in glorious HD. It does highlight the unusual packaging that Chumby Industries have gone with at this stage, people seem to either love it or think it’s outright weird. Personally I think the packaging is a nice touch.

Chumby Unboxed And Unpacked In HD

I discovered a nice photos of the insides of a Chumby at http://www.cartoonmonkey.com/?p=316. This is ideal for those who like to look under the hood, but haven’t got their hands on one yet.

Chumby Industries recently announced that they have created a new category of widgets called “Widget Laboratory”.

“We have opened up the widget floodgates and have pushed many of the developer widgets live to the chumby network to a new category called “Widget Laboratory”. We are trying to get your widgets pushed live quickly so when you upload a widget and mark it public, we’ll do a quick sanity test to assure the widget works and abides by our Terms of Use, and add the widget to the live site within 2 business days.”

The screenshot below shows the new category.

This is another example that the folks at Chumby are focused on working with developers every step of the way. You can view the new channel at the Chumby widget directory.

Thanks to a great post from skada over on at the Chumby Forum, here are some simple instructions on getting a USB memory stick to play on your Chumby.

You can read and discuss this at http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=1034.

Here is a video clip showing a magic 8 ball Chumby widget in action. It shows a good example of the use of the accelerometer. We will no doubt see lots more of this type of application, along with snow globes and other shake enabled goodies.

For those who haven’t got a Chumby yet, which is most of us, someone has kindly recorded the introduction sequence.

Came across a few interesting videos on YouTube of Chumby. Both from the same person, one playing with Qt, and the other demonstrating a “cover flow” animated effect.

Cover Flow

Qt 4.3.2