Thursday 19 November 2009

Chumby One - Cute and affordable fun.

A little while ago I blogged about the Chumby, a fine little ARM+Linux based internet device made by Chumby Industries.

Well, now they have gone one step futher and produced the Chumby One (see right), which currently retails for $99 for pre-orders. This new version comes with some extra features compared to the original: an FM radio, support for a rechargeable lithium ion battery an easier to use volume dial.

There is a great blog article about design rationale behind this new product on Bunnies Blog including a video of the production line and some photos of the motherboard.

I'm quite a fan of the Chumby Classic, but it's great to see a far more affordable little brother being added to the product range! I wish Chumby Industries every success with the Chumby One.

2 comments:

  1. The device looks very interesting.
    But the widgets are programmed in Flash, which is for me a major draw back.
    Is it possible to install Ubuntu on ARM on the Chumby one? I couldn't find a answer searching their Wiki.

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  2. @Anonymous, I've had a poke around and it may be technically possible to port Ubuntu to this device, but it needs some kernel work. However, the toolchain is easy to get hold of and porting apps to it isn't too hard. I've already ported bash and SDL to it. It's fairly easy to ssh into this device and get hacking on it.

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