Chumby Guts - cool but can be better

I put my Chumby guts together this week. They are available at the Maker Shed http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKCH1 for $139. I took advantage of the initial offering of $99.

The chumby is an interesting device. It is a device is like an iTouch or iPhone, but you leave it on all the time and have it flip through each application every 30-60 seconds. Granted there are only about 1300 applications, 200 of which are clocks. But the potential is there.

The chumby has a 320x240 touchscreen, wifi, an accelerometer, 2 usb ports, microphoen and is linux based. Like a facebook app, you can partially host the application.

The 2 issues I have with the chumby is it's wifi and the network interface. The usb wifi card is reallllllllly weak. I even put the wifi card on a usb cable away from the chumby's shielding and it still was horrible. I found an antenna at Halted Electronics that fixed the problem.

• http://www.halted.com/commerce/catalog/product.jsp?product_id=24191
• http://www.halted.com/commerce/catalog/product.jsp?product_id=24192
  

With the antenna, it is working well.

For setting up your wifi password, they don't present a keyboard.
They provide three lines that scroll left and right. One line are the lowercase characters, one upper and the third numbers and symbols. Other than a game console where you cursor through the screen of letters, numbers and characters, I have not seen a worse data entry screen. From playing with the twitter widget, I it can present a keyboard.

So, overall, it is an interesting device that offers folks lots of possibilities for writing network aware widgets.

But for the cost, up the ante on the wifi card and redo the passphrase interface.