what to do with chumby

I have 2 chumby's.  I really liked them.  They showed me the weather and ESPN sports headlines alternating back and forth.  This is all I needed to know every morning.  Now, poor chumby appears to be bankrupt and they shut the servers off.  
 
What to do?  Can you host your own chumby server?  Or do I just have a clock now?

Interested in this, too. :mellow:

Lou Apo said:

I have 2 chumby's.  I really liked them.  They showed me the weather and ESPN sports headlines alternating back and forth.  This is all I needed to know every morning.  Now, poor chumby appears to be bankrupt and they shut the servers off.  
 
What to do?  Can you host your own chumby server?  Or do I just have a clock now?

Click to expand...

It looks like they changed servers. http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=8580
Full service depends on future funding. http://www.chumby.com/
One of the Chumby forum members "Zurk" also made an offline firmware.
Here is a link to the Chumby 8 thread. http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=7832

Here is the Chumby1/Chumby classic / Infocast 3.5 thread http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=7831

Waynedb said:

It looks like they changed servers. http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=8580
Full service depends on future funding. http://www.chumby.com/
One of the Chumby forum members "Zurk" also made an offline firmware.
Here is a link to that thread. http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=7832

Click to expand...

 
Thanks, I just have to find where the hack is to convert my chumby Insignia to the firmware that I can control the server on.
 
EDIT:
 
https://www.box.com/s/95249fc14f1912ef588b is the link to the firmware.
 
http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=6483&p=5  is the link to the instructions (the link in the instructions is dead, that is why you need the above link)
 
I haven't done it yet, but it looks promising.
 
Thanks again.

I only had the link for Chumby 8 / Infocast 8 in my original post so I added the link for the smaller Chumby.

Trying to download the first one again, but, Lou's worked fine.

I remember buying and returning a Sony Dash. I really wanted to like the product but I really really hated the setup (Chumby).
 
The OS had the smell of greed, stupidity and failure. Why they locked you down to their servers and worse yet Sony's, on such a simple device whose main appeal would be geeks and hackers always baffled me. How many apps? 100? How many good apps? maybe two. Maybe less.
 
Why wasn't it like a typical home router, where you could set it up via a web interface? Why didn't Chumby open source the mess before tanking? Who knows.
 
Could Sony have saved it? No. Sony's firmware department historically has zero interest in OS updates for any product that's not a PlayStation. Besides Sony's a hardware company.
 
It was a nice looking clock though.

I purchased a few Chumby's (Insigna little and big ones).  I gave away most of them except for 1-2 of them.
 
I chrooted mine such that it would run a bit more robustly (x windows/Linux).   
 
That said though I haven't played with the Chumby in a while. 
 
Are the little Chumby flash widgets though posted somewhere for download though?

I tried doing the conversion but it didn't work.
 

I followed the directions and got to the update screen.  The chumby had the "update from usb" greyed out.  I noticed from the instructions that the file was supposed to be called "update.zip", so I changed the name to that and started over.  Now the option to update from usb was active.  However, after pushing the butoon, I got the update in progress screen, but it just sat there never doing any update.
 
So, as far as I can tell, the file is not correct.  Does anyone have a link to a good version of the firmware?
 
Or am I just doing something wrong?

The file is big and the site is slow, so, download with DTA or the like.

TonyNo said:

The file is big and the site is slow, so, download with DTA or the like.

Click to expand...

 
 
Well that is weird.  The file downloaded as less than 1k.  Which I thought was oddly small.  But I have downloaded it several times and each time it comes as a tiny little file.
 
I just checked it again, and the file description from box.com is that it is 869bytes.  So it isn't a download error.
 
Perhaps you have a good copy that you could upload to a file sharer?  I would be quite grateful.

That small download is just a shell script:

#!/bin/sh

# check if mod has been done before...
if [ -f /psp/i8-c8mod ]; then
echo "Modification already performed.. no need to do it again!"
exit 1
fi

# print welcome message to console...
echo -e "Modifying the Infocast download_cp script.\nThis modification will allow your Infocast to download the Chumby8 controlpanels.\nTo revert, remount / as rw and rename /usr/chumby/scripts/download_cp-orig to download_cp."

# stop the control panel...
/usr/chumby/scripts/stop_control_panel

# switch fb to 0
switch_fb.sh 0

# print message to the screen...
/usr/chumby/scripts/blast_img updating_software.bin

# mount / as rw
mount -o remount,rw /dev/root /

echo "Moving /psp/alarms to /psp/alarms-orig to clear broken Infocast alarms file..."
mv /psp/alarms /psp/alarms-orig

echo "Backing up /usr/share/chumby/scripts/download_cp..."
cp /usr/chumby/scripts/download_cp /usr/chumby/scripts/download_cp-orig

echo "Modifying download_cp..."
cd /usr/chumby/scripts/
patch <<'END_PATCH'
--- download_cp-o
+++ download_cp
@@ -35,6 +35,12 @@
$urlbase=`cat /psp/urlbase_dlcp`;
chomp( $urlbase );
}
+
+if (-f "/psp/cp_hardware_ver")
+{
+ $hw=`cat /psp/cp_hardware_ver`;
+}
+
if (-f "/psp/cp_software_ver")
{
$sw=`cat /psp/cp_software_ver`;
END_PATCH


echo "Spoofing new hardware revision..."
echo -n "9.9" > /psp/cp_hardware_ver

echo "All done!"

sleep 2

# force redownload of cp
touch /tmp/new_cp_available

# remount / ro
mount -o remount,ro /dev/root /

# clear the screen
cat /dev/zero > /dev/fb0

# start the new control panel
/usr/chumby/scripts/start_control_panel

echo "infocast8 to chumby8 conversion successful!" > /psp/i8-c8mod


I did find a link the Chumby 8 thread, which points to SourceForge, should work for anyone (around 263MB):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zurk/files/zurk_chumby8_infocast.zip/download

Thanks Dan. 
 
I got it downloaded, though that server stinks the big one.  I had to restart the download a ton of times to get it to finish, something like 15 or 20 tries.  A couple times it got all the way to 90% then froze.  But I finally got it.  Hopefully it will work.

From SourceForge?  They have a pretty great backend, am surprised to hear that.  If many people want this, it might be time to create a .torrent.

Well I got started with this, but am wondering if it is worth the effort.  The directions are kind of hard to figure out.  I had to use SSH to "telnet" into the chumby but am sort of at a loss as to how I am then supposed to import the new file structure.  If anyone has done it, I would love to hear some advice.