I find it frustrating that the blog post does not explain what a Chumby is.<p>Neither does the chumby.com homepage.<p>Incredibly, neither does the item description in the Chumby store.<p>I'm sure that this announcement is great news for someone, but is Chumby supposed to be a well-kept secret? Why make it so hard to discover what a Chumby does and for who?
Interesting, I've got 3.5 Chumbies :-) This is not a good thing for me :-(<p>The Chumby was a product from Bunnie Studios which was an ARM system with a touch screen, embedded is a bean bag kind of case. It had an application which is basically a flash player (yes on ARM, the only one I know of these days) and it would cycle between flash applications on a "channel." Some times it would cycle through to an advertisement.<p>It has an accelerometer, speaker, 320 x 240 x 16 touch screen, a couple of USB ports and a wireless network connector. You can wire up a USB serial port to the console if you have something like the AdaFruit FTDIFriend board.<p>It very much was the classic case of something "before its time" and the business model was kind of dicey. If you didn't want commercials you were out of luck. Once the company shut down they left a server up serving the one App I really liked, "Space Clock" which was a clock like you might see on a Star Trek universe ship (it has a very LCS look to it).<p>The site has been revived and a new business model has been put in placed, $3 per month subscription for the ability to run 'apps' on your Chumby. I presume it no longer shows ads.<p>Its sad for me because it has a really crappy clock app now that runs instead of the space clock, and that is going to force me to finish up my OS replacement. The thing is based loosely on the old Beagle board and much of the things that run on that board run on the Chumby. In particular there is a Ubuntu image for it.<p>I get the subscription thing, but I don't get the price. For $36/year you can run quite a bit of server. A single droplet ($5/month) can serve up several thousand Chumbies (they don't make I/O requests all that often). $3 a year would have made more sense to me, even $5 a year. Anything more than $12 a year and I'm just not going to go there.<p>The reason I have 3.5 is that the .5 is the 'Chumby Guts' option that Adafruit offered for a while. It was all of the parts, minus the squishy case. At $99 for the parts it was a really good deal for a small ARM linux system with a touch screen. I wish them luck, and I'm glad they are back, but I think they need to rethink that price.
This sort of dedication (in addition to him being a great developer, hacker and all around swell guy) is why anyone would be lucky to work with/for Duane Maxwell.
What is this company? The linked blog post does little to enlighten me, and even after reading the chumby.com homepage I'm still unsure. It looks like they sell hardware? For what purpose?
The Chumby was cool 4 years ago... When the Chumby services started getting flaky as their business died I replaced mine with an Android tablet in a sound dock. The Android tablet is more reliable, has more apps, and doesn't turn into a worthless brick when the internet goes down. I still have the Chumby in a box somewhere, maybe now that services are back up I can sell it and recover some of my cost.
Look up Sony Dash, it was Sony's version of the Chumby. Got it for free with a notebook purchase and it's still running beside my bed however I stopped using most apps long ago. Loved the concept but the execution left a lot to be desired. CPU could never make the flash based apps feel snappy. Still makes a sweet alarm clock though.<p>One app would load content from any url you specified. Tied it to a script that summarized the status of our servers so I could monitor it anytime.
I desperately tried to buy a Chumby when they came out.
"Only shipping to US!" .. Fine, ok - whatever... I'll have it mailed to a friend and pick it up from them.<p>"Oh, trying to use a non-US Visa/Mastercard?? No no no"<p>.. Then gave up. Trying to throw money at a company that won't take it, they went bust. Not surprised.