Chumby offers opportunity for home engineering

By David Blaza, Vice President, UBM Electronics -- EDN, August 4, 2011

Mostly out of curiosity and an interest in how open source Internet appliances are working these days, I purchased a Chumby One for $49 from Woot (list is $129, but most sell for $50 to $70).  There are now five Chumby devices of various sizes, including the Sony Dash, which all connect to a Wi-fi network to run flash based applications for weather, news, Twitter, Facebook, webcams, and photos. 

This Chumby has a 3.5-inch touch screen, FM radio, accelerometer, rechargeable battery, USB 2.0 port, microphone, 2W speaker, 64 MB of memory, 1-GB internal micro SD card for firmware, and a 454-Mhz Freescale iMX ARM9 processor.

To set up the device, go online to Chumby.com to choose your apps, then plug in the Chumby and use the touch screen to access your wireless network. Set up was simple enough and a fun experience, especially choosing from the hundreds of apps to display on the Chumby. 

But here's where it gets interesting: Because anyone can submit an app and Chumby Industries has been very open to hacking the Linux kernel, there are several ways to change the firmware with OpenEmbedded to tailor the device to your own needs. With that, Chumby becomes a very inexpensive, connected, touch-screen ARM development kit. In addition, there is a lot of community support in the Chumby wiki.

Read More Prying Eyes write-ups.

There are some cool projects in the wiki like turning it into a Web server and connecting it to an iPod as a music server. With the increasing number of home wireless networks being installed in the US there is so much potential for device like the Chumby to be used as interfaces for home security, appliances, irrigation, and climate control. This is in contrast to the variety of home automation devices on the market, most of are expensive and complex to set up. Is there a nascent market for cheap home automation products like the old X10 protocol but based on 802.11?

Teardown: A look inside the Chumby

Removing four screws from the back cover get us to the wireless card, which is a simple USB plug in stick type with the cover removed. It's a Ralink RT2571WF, dating back to 2005. 

Getting the Chumby apart shows a very simple modular design around a mother board with a 1-GB micro SD card on one side, a Freescale iMX233 under a heat sink, and Hynix 64-MB memory as the largest part on the board.

There is also an FM tuner from Quintic, a Santa Clara-based company, and a USB 2.0 controller from Taiwan's Genesys Logic, as well. Further, a Freescale 3 axis accelerometer (MMA7455) can be found.    

For more on the Chumby, see this iFixit teardown of the Chumby One exhibiting a later version of the device with more memory and some updated components which may explain why I was able to buy this one below $50.