Friday, January 11, 2008

Chumby - first impressions

I just adopted a Chumby.
    http://www.chumby.com/story

Open the bag, plug it in, run the short built-in tutorial, go to the chumby web site to name and authenticate, select some widgets, and away you go.  ...approx 15 minutes.

Now playing...

Poking around in the control panel, you can enable ssh and login.  It is Linux, very familiar.  It has Perl but not Python.  The flash memory is pretty full so if you need more than 1.9MB you need to add a memory stick which you will see at /mnt/usb.  ...and if you put Python on a stick and set PATH, away you go.  Remember this is an ARM processor so your executables need to be compiled accordingly.  You can also access the Chumby via browser at http://<IP addr> but until you load some pages it is kinda lame.  ...but it does work.

It has a touch screen, wi-fi access, 2 USB ports, Flash for GUIs, add Python and I'm ready to write some of my own code.
 

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