Chumby - a Flash Lite 2 alarm clock on steriods
August 27th, 2006 by Scott Janousek
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No it’s not Gumby (oh nooooo, Mr. Bill), it’s “Chumby”.
Keith Peters just posted about the unreleased Flash Lite 2 enabled device.
If the iriver u10 and nabaztag ever had offspring, this would likely be it.
At first glance, it looks to be just an alarm clock, but after you read about the device, you’ll think differently.
Interested? Check out “What is Chumby?”. There is also info on engadget and dyl world.
Here are the hardware specs (subject to change):
Hardware:
266 MHz ARM controller (the MX21 by Freescale)
32 MB SDRAM running at 133 MHz bus speed
64 MB NAND FLASH ROM
320×240 3.5″ TFT LCD with PWM-controlled LED backlighting
Stereo 2W speakers
Headphone output
Ambient light sensor
Bend sensor (to pick up when you squeeze the chumby)
Two USB 2.0 ports, one on the main board and one on the outerware electronics
WiFi connectivity via a USB dongle plugged into the main board
Circuitry to detect the presence of wall adapter power and auto-fallback to backup battery power
Switching power supply network that can eat between 6V and 14V
Available microphone input on the chumbilical bus
Available SPI bus on the chumbilical bus
Serial debug port set to 115200 8N1
It runs Linux and appears to be quite hackable. (Note: Register to get more information here)
They have the schematics posted here, as well as some circuit diagrams (Note: You’ll need to login to get this info).
Also, the creators are more than willing to share information on how the community built around this device can mod it to suit everyday needs! They’ve even started a forum area, as well as a wiki.
Two features that really stand out to me, are the WiFi capabilities and the openness of the platform. The combination of these two things means endless possbilities for the device (RSS Feeds, Flickr integration, etc).
With all this, it’s actually much more than an alarm clock on steriods!
What about Flash Lite? Here’s what they have to say about the Flash Lite capabilities with the Chumb-ster:
Are you a Flash animation stud and would like to develop something for the chumby? We like to think of a chumby as a Flash showcase and encourage Flashers to spread their talents through our network.
A chumby runs Adobe/Macromedia’s FlashLite 2.0 player with some custom modifications.
Unlike the older FlashLite 1.1, which was based on Flash 4-level technology, the new player is basically Flash 7 with a few omissions:
It does not support video (Sorenson or On2) or Nelly Moser audio
It does not support LocalConnection or XMLSocket.
It does not support the Flash Communication Server
There are no device fonts
A few other minor things that few people use
The device has a persistent network connection through WiFi, has a 320hx240v 16 bpp display with a touchscreen (that means no mouseMove events when the mouse is up), and no keyboard, so no input TextFields. It has stereo audio. The movie is given approximately 4MB of RAM to run within. The processor is a 266MHz ARM9 - roughly the performance of a desktop PC circa 1996. CPU-heavy movies will cause audio stuttering and sluggishness.
For speed reasons, FlashLite resamples images and embedded fonts at a much lower quality than the regular Flash 7 plugin, roughly equivalent to _quality=”MEDIUM”. You should avoid small serif fonts and resizing of images wherever possible.
The device slideshows movies (called “widgets”) - the movies are not expected to require human intervention to operate, and a movie may play for an indeterminate amount of time, although the movie can provide hints to the controlling process. A movie should not have a “Play” button after a preloader or other modal behavior.
The movie is given a block of XML containing name/value pairs that are configured by the user on the website to set parameters for the movie. For instance, a stock widget would get a list of stock symbols in that XML.
At the moment, the widget has a security sandbox similar to a movie running in a standalone player on a PC, however, one should build widgets assuming that the movie is running in a regular Flash plugin, running from a website - an external source of content should have an appropriate crossdomain.xml file to expose content to the widget. One should also build widgets so they can be loadMovie()’d into another “virtual chumby” movie at some level other than _root - this means you should try to avoid adding random properties to _root or the built-in objects.
In general, widgets should be under 100K in size in order to reduce download time and use the minimum of storage in the device itself.
Chumbies are not for sale yet. They are rumored to ship in early 2007, at around $150. This is a great price point, as some multi-purpose alarm clocks cost around $100 USD … but the Chumby certainly can do much much more than that!
Check out the site for more information.
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August 27th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
This totally awesome, great idea! Wonder how much it’ll cost.
August 27th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
Good question, not sure.
August 28th, 2006 at 3:53 am
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August 28th, 2006 at 8:48 am
$150.
August 28th, 2006 at 9:41 am
Ciao Scott,
another cool toy.
Hey can you launch FL2 animation based on the alarm clock?
I could not see anything about it and their site is down due to traffic.
Alessandro
August 28th, 2006 at 9:53 am
From what I saw, I can’t think of a reason why not … in their terminology it would be just a “widget” that calls another “widget”.
This device has got a lot of potential if it makes it to market.
August 28th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
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August 31st, 2006 at 11:14 am
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December 18th, 2006 at 9:49 am
Cool!LCD Clock
November 15th, 2007 at 12:04 am
This is a cool clock. Thanks!
January 18th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I could not see anything about it and their site is down due to traffic.