Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 4: reboot/poweroff | Hacker News Reader

Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 4: reboot/poweroff

downtowndougbrown.com

54 pointszdw10 comments

Wow! someone is still using a chumby 8! I designed the hardware and some of the firmware... if you get stuck I might have some old notes laying around somewhere still, happy to share them. But from the looks of your post, you've figured out more than I can easily recall about the design.

I miss my Chumby One, it had some kinda hardware failure while support was waning (looks like things got better). I've got an Echo 5 now, but it's kinda soulless.

Check the caps in the wall wart (or a new wall wart). They went bad in mine and needed replacing.

A lesson many will learn from repairing lots of electronics is "always check the electrolytic capacitors." Even before and after the infamous Capacitor Plague, they were know for their relative unreliability.

Hey, thanks bunnie! I will definitely keep that in mind if I run into any future snags on this project. So far so good!

I always wondered, was it just a matter of RPi having better PR, or did we just went the wrong timeline?

Why aren't we surrounded with chumby X, chumby hackerboard Y and Successor Z?

This is really cool from a 'historical preservation' angle!

From a sane human being angle, this is a ton of work for what is effectively replaced by a Google Nest Hub, Lenovo M8 docked, or Echo 8 or such. Often for well under $50

That said, I would kill for an unlocked bootloader on the FB Portal now that FB is dropping the product. At least give me the ability to install other apps. lol

None of those are user-controlled, though; a Chumby is unambiguously the user's tool, rather than serving corporate interests that are quite likely neutral-to-adversarial to the user's best interests.

The Lenovo M8 is an Android tablet with a charging dock. It's not a bare terminal, but you can absolutely decide most of what is on it.

Oh, my mistake; I assumed it was one of their "smart displays" (https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/smart-display/), but yeah, Android is... less bad than the others in that list, at least.

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