Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 5: graphics | Hacker News Reader

Upgrading my Chumby 8 kernel part 5: graphics

downtowndougbrown.com

70 pointszdw13 comments

Fun to see this. I was gifted an internal Chumby prototype that was given to a VP at my company who asked me if we could do anything with it. We couldn't, but I thought it was a cute concept (it had a soft/plush body versus the more standard rigid plastic and was marketed as very approachable

I wrote a few AS3 apps for it and concluded there were enough hardware limitations that it wasn't worth bothering with.

But for a few years after I tried to tinker with it to turn it into something more useful but some physical component broke before I got too far and I didn't care enough to pursue. Glad someone is outlining this in detail.

What always struck me about the Chumby is it seemed doomed from the start. There was no real use case, no niche spot for it to exist in. If you can procure a Raspberry Pi and $80 you can build the Chumby1000 and have it do some interesting things, but nothing a bunch of commodity hardware already in your house doesn't do much better.

Chumby was 10 years too early. The Amazon Echo Show and equivalent devices for other platforms fulfill that use case today, but with a lot less charm.

And with a lot less privacy.

They Pies are so ubiquitous. A bit like with smartphones or the internet, with each passing year, it's harder and harder to remember a time they didn't exist... Even though I was paying much attention to the scene before the Pies (Gumstix, Leopardboard, BeagleBoard, Chumby, etc), it sometimes feel like they've been here for longer than they were.

Totally agree.

And it didn't even have to complete in the Show/Portal/HomePod space. There are dozens of half-baked projects where people glue LCDs to RPIs to make a simple Linux-enabled display and Chumby had all of this in a nice package, ready to go.

There's a total need for this type of device again but nobody takes these kinds of risks anymore. My Chumby was a Best Buy Insignia model and I'm amazed BB even greenlit this thing. It was on clearance like six months after it launched.

Wow. With the discipline and tenacity that Doug puts into getting retro hardware+software working, I wonder what he could accomplish at hacking away on modern systems!

i don’t really understand whether this level of hobby (obsession?) to invest huge amounts of time/resources into getting hipster hardware to “work” is… healthy?

I have an old Chumby, it was never useful, not even when the company existed.

It's in a box somewhere. It was just too slow to do anything useful.

Mine served well as internet radio.

Me too - think I used it for a day or too - even though it wasn't very useful I have a soft spot because it was such a cute design and I could tell it was a good idea too early for it's time

oh that was great idea

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