Specialization is for Insects, Seth says

I’ve been following the Chumby phenomenon for some time now. If you haven’t been, the chumby is a plush little gadget with a lcd screen that displays flash widgets pulled from the interwebs. It is; Open Source, running linux, and really neat. It has; usb, wifi, flash, an accelerometer, touch screen speakers, headphone jack, etc. And if you can’t guess, I want one bad.

So far the Chumby hasn’t been for sale. Several were given away at Foo Camp ‘06, to much applause and surge of interest on the blag-o-sphere. A few were given out to hackers, crafters and flash animators since then, but it was still being revised for final release.

This has been really infuriating, but a great way to get hackers interested. It sort of follows the OSI concept of releasing code versions early and often so distributed bugfinding can happen. If you remember the Chumby is Open Source. So those who do have early versions of the Chumby have been able to hack the little toy and have total access to the source diagrams and schematics. One person has already done quite a bit of work by putting the Damn Small Linux window manager on the Chumby, instead of the default flash interface.

Bunnie (of Xbox hacking fame) has been making changes and slight revisions to the Chumby ever since, and ramping up production in China (some neat videos and entries on his blog about this). It’s now past Foo Camp ‘07 and the Chumby, originally slated for a spring release, is about to go on sale.

But before they were to be sold, one last testing beta was released to the public. The ‘first 50′ beta was application based, and plenty of people applied. The previous beta’s were mostly sent to hackers/flashanimators/crafters of awesome power and renown. But the new release has been sent to all demographics. Because the chumby is not just marketed to haXsorz, but also to the teenage girl who wants IM, MP3’s and an alarmclock on her bedstand.

My application stated that I had plenty of user-related uses, such as tracking my Remember the Milk, gCal, and Feeds, but also some Flash of my own and maybe some hardware level i/o hacking (the chumby has plenty of 3.3v ttl i/o btw). But I didn’t get one :(. Ah well, I’m sure lots and lots of people were asking.

So instead I’ve been tracking what’s going on in the chumby world. Not too much news from Chumby Corporate or elsewhere. I have found at least three of the lucky few on Flickr (which I have a Chumby group at). I look forward to seeing other’s start to blog and talk about their experiences with the Chumby. And hopefully it is released sooner than later.

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Somebody want to buy me one!?!

The Chumby ‘First 50′ Arrive by Seth Woodworth, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.