Honey I Enlarged the ….

… the Chumby?! Over at our sister publication, ThirdPipe.com, we covered the open source hardware. Then we said it would be a popular hackable piece of hardware and software. Well we envisioned more along the line of software hacks, but then some people just find that very confining –

For hackers, the fun part of consumer electronics is taking things apart and making them do things they weren’t originally meant to do. Since most consumer electronics devices are closed source, it’s a laborious process to do a hack; first you must reverse engineer the platform, and you are often relying on gut and instinct to grope around at the edges of your knowledge about the platform. Thus, on most platforms, it’s a challenge to reskin or case-mod the device, and deducing the location of a debug port and opening a console shell on the device is a big deal.

Chumby is different; it is open source, and designed to be hacked. For example, the serial port is spelled out on the silkscreen for you and there’s a backdoor to enable sshd, so it’s not big deal to bring up the console. Because of its hackability, you are enabled to do significant modifications due to the availability of all levels of design documentation—hardware, drivers, and application software. While it would be an enormous task to, for example, open up a Zune and put a larger screen on it, here, in this post, I will show you how to hack a chumby to have a larger, higher-resolution screen without too much effort. The native chumby screen is a 3.5” QVGA (320×240) display, but after you complete this hack, you will be treated to a 5.7” VGA (640×480) display.

Now this is probably out of the genre of Tightwad pricing. I mean the guy even has a XY laser cutter sitting in his living room. But short of that all the bits and pieces needed are a Tightwad type of project. And I marvel at the authors dexterity in the industrial arts — robotics, mechanics, electronics and software. Only thing missing was casting metal parts and waving a light saber. Kudos.

By the way the Chumby is a nice bit of kit for those that just want to hack software. If you have a child with a computer science hankering this was a good introduction to hardware level programming. The SDK that comes with it has the tools needed to turn the device into anything from an alarm clock to a weather station display.

Linky.