• Registered: 2007-07-04
  • Posts: 64

Topic: chumby as a tablet

It would be slick to be able to use a chumby as a mini touchscreen for photoshop or something along those lines so you can use a stylus on the screen and draw on photoshop flash or whatever you are into.  Also as the chumby is hooked up to your computers USB port it could charge a rechargeable battery kinda like an ipod.

  • Registered: 2006-08-29
  • Posts: 204

Re: chumby as a tablet

If you wanted a tablet, the chumby isn't the best thing for you. After all, you could probably get one at least 4x as big for the same price.
And the battery's only there to keep it from dieing in a power outage, its not meant to be without the cord. I don't think that'd work anyway, since it is supplying power though the USB ports. If you hooked it up to your computer they'd probably battle for control tongue However, you could probably charge an iPod from it ;-)

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,197

Re: chumby as a tablet

The USB on the chumby is a "host", so that you can hook up peripherals, but that means you can't hook it up directly to another host such as a desktop computer.

We considered setting up the chumby to use USB OTG ("on the go") which allows the device to act as either a host or peripheral, but OTG mandates the use of the "mini" USB connector and special USB cables.  We felt it was more important for the chumby to act as a host and use common cabling and connectors.

Since there's no substantial available storage on the device iteslef, it makes little sense to mount the device as mass storage on a PC, as you would an MP3 player, for instance.  Instead, we went the other way - you can mount a PC's shares (using NFS) on the chumby device, and you can use scp or other tools to transfer individual files and directories.

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