Chumby One: handsome successor to the cutest computer ever

The Chumby One -- the successor to the incredibly innovative Chumby device -- is just about ready to ship, and is available for $99. Chumby is a cute, squeezable hand-held device that is wide open -- everything from the circuit board designs to the software is open-licensed and freely downloadable. The idea is to produce an adorable, versatile device that any hacker, anywhere, can improve, so that all Chumby owners can get more out of it. I have a couple of them at the office and I love playing with them. The new version looks amazing.

In addition to being about half the price of the original chumby, the new device added some features: it has an FM radio, and it has support for a rechargeable lithium ion battery (although it's not included with the device, you have to buy one and install it yourself). There's also a knob so you can easily/quickly adjust the volume. But I don't think those are really the significant new features. What really gets me excited about this one is that it's much more hackable. The most significant improvement is that the firmware is stored on a microSD card.

The microSD card isn't replaceable from the outside -- this is to prevent non-hackers from pulling it out and wondering why the device isn't booting anymore -- but if you take the back panel off (screws this time, no glue seals), it's fairly easy to access. The key here is that no longer do you have to worry about bricking your chumby device: if you screw up the firmware, you just pull it out, mount it on your dev box, and dd a new image onto it. Also, microSD is a "managed" NAND device, unlike our previous generation device which used a raw NAND device. This means that we don't have to rely on a MTD layer for the filesystem, and instead we can directly drop ext3 onto the device. While we still mount the root partition as read-only to harden the device against accidental damage, unlike our original cramfs implementation, you can trivially remount it as read/write and modify the linux on the device. Also, our OS image takes up only a small portion of the total device capacity, so there's actually over a gigabyte of extra space on there for you to load extra applications and libraries.

chumby One (Bunnie Huang's blog)

Chumby Store

More on how tinkering is making a comeback. This is a radio interview from the program 'On Point' from NPR in the US. One of the guests is Justin Lahart who wrote the article 'Tinkering makes a comeback amid crisis' in the Wall St. Journal and we highlighted in this blog.

Are you a tinkerer 2.0? We still want to see your tinkering. Let us know what you're up to through pictures, words or video. See the Future Tense tinkering project page to find out how you can contribute.

(Photo: Scott Beale/Laughing Squid via Flickr)

Our colleague Ryan Egan, who presents Tech Stream on Radio Australia sent us this really interesting article from the Wall St Journal. it seems quite a few people, along with Alex Pang, whom we interviewed on his ideas about tinkering, are seeing tinkering as the future.

Occupying a space somewhere between shop class and the computer lab, the new tinkerers are making everything from devices that Twitter how much beer is left in a keg to robots that assist doctors. The experimentation is even creating companies. With innovation a prime factor in driving economic growth, and corporate research and development spending tepid, the marriage of brains and brawn offers one hopeful glimmer.

Read the full article here.

John Kent submitted some of his tinkering to Pool.

FPGA stands for Field Programmable Gate Array. It is a silicon chip with programmable interconnects and configuration that allows you to design your own digital logic circuits.

It used to be that to design digital logic circuits you had to use existing chips such as TTL (Transistor Transistor Logic) or microprocessor chips and peripheral interfaces containing predefined functionality. You typically had to design a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) to wire the chips together. A PCB is usually a piece of fibre glass board with a thin layer or multiple layers of copper cladding on it. You would use photosensitive resist to protect the copper tracks you want to keep and use an etchant to dissolve the unwanted copper. You would then drill holes in the PCB for the component leads and solder the components into place. This was usually a very messy and time consuming process, and once the PCB was produced you could not easily modify it.

FPGAs on the other hand can be reprogrammed to do whatever you want. You can download the design into the chip from your PC using a USB or printer port cable or use Flash memory to store the design. You still need a PCB to mount the FPGA on, but you can buy general purpose evaluation boards from various vendors.

You typically design the logic using a language like VHDL or Verilog, although there are also new systems that convert conventional programming languages like C into hardware descriptions. The difference is that you are generating a hardware configuration rather than a set of instructions. The major FPGA vendors allow you to download their design software for free to encourage you to use their FPGAs.

Many hobbyists are using this software to design their own microprocessor design for use in things like pinball and arcade games from the1980s. eg.

http://www.edcheung.com/album/album06/Pinball/pinball.htm

I have designed my own microprocessor System on a Chip (SoC) that include the microprocessor, memory, serial port, keyboard interface and a video display that can be plugged into a VGA display. I have designed the actual internal logic of the chips. I can run the old software from early computers on this system at a much higher speed than could be obtained with the original computers. My SoC is based on the design of the 6809 8 bit microprocessor that dates back to the early days of microcomputers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This was a way of teaching myself computer design. There are a number of other people who have designed other chips such as the Z80 and PIC and many others and even old minicomputer and mainframe computers such as the PDP-8, PDP-11 and IBM 1130.

I would like to extend my designs to quad core implementations similar to what is found in personal computers today, although obviously not as complex. I'm also looking to use the parallel nature of FPGA logic to speed up computer vision applications. That is, to digitizing video and uses FPGA logic to process and analyze video at frame rates.

Computer vision can be used to implement things like augmented reality. i.e. using FPGAs to implement stereo vision and depth perception or facial feature detection to interface to a virtual reality client. Such technology can be used improve the experience of things like Second Life in conferencing and hence reduce the reliance on fossil fuels for transport. It could also reduce road congestion and the time taken to commute to work.

Submitted to our Tinkering Flickr group by dee.fifty.