1 Topic by jp

  • jp
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  • From: San Diego
  • Registered: 2007-05-31
  • Posts: 16

Topic: Chumby 2.0?

I was just wondering if you envision keeping chumby pretty much the same over time, or if you are expecting frequent upgrades and changes to the software and/or the hardware.

Thinking outside the box for "hacking" potential, many ideas run up against the question of whether or not a particular mod will be rendered worthless by a change in the available units.

Simple example.  Suppose I develop a business based on turning chumbys into kiosks.  I might spend some money on tooling for the part of the thing that holds the chumby in place on the top of the unit.  What sort of expectations can you give me regarding how frequently I might need to start over and re-design my kiosk because of design changes to chumby.

From the software side, I'm told that the production chumbys will ship with a microphone.  Suppose I write some software that depends on that functionality.  Do I have any reasonable expectation that all future chumbys will ship with a microphone?

I realize I'm asking for the moon here, but it's not an empty question.  I'm just trying to get you to consider these "outside the box" uses for chumby and perhaps architect some sort of an upgrade path that makes it practical for you to give developers some sort of visibility/expectations on the stability of various aspects of the design.

One example would be making "old" versions of the product available for a year after any major design change.

A few years ago I got all excited about doing something like this with PalmOS devices, and before I even had time to get into it, they started to put out a completely new design every 6 months or so.  No way to keep up with that.  Trying to make iPod accessories comes with the same sort of a "that's so last week" schedule of major design changes.

Chumby is making a big deal out of it's "hackability".  I just wanted to push your nose down in the carpet in a pile of stuff that is particularly difficult for a company to deal with (both the parent company and those that try to develop accessories/modifications/alternative-uses for their products.)  I'm hoping you will look at this now and talk to developers about it and work out a reasonable compromise now, rather than waiting until it becomes an "issue" (or a company killing gotcha for lots of small companies that are relying on you and your success).

thanks,
jp

Many people are concerned about the condition of Politics in America today.  What they don't understand is that the Fathers of our Nation were shooting for maximum comedic value.  In that regard, our system of government has only improved with time. -- Mark Twain (if he were alive today and inhabiting my body)

jp's Website

  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-29
  • Posts: 159

Re: Chumby 2.0?

The beauty of an open design means that you're free to innovate around it.  We even post schematics on our Web site of how we build the device and the full software toolchain.  Hopefully this gives you and the community everything you need to control your own destiny a bit. :^)  The chumby device is likely to change in the future, just like Mozilla Firefox keeps changing.  Hopefully, and unlike most consumer electronic products, this means that chumbys keep getting better over time, not more obsolete.  Will functionality be added that wasn't there before?  Certainly.  Will some current functionality go away or be accomplished differently than at present?  Possibly, but we really want to avoid anything that renders lots of popular widgets useless -- so we'll strive for backwards compatibility.

Not sure if this answers your question, but we don't plan on being static and we do plan on being as "transparent" and open as possible so that a hardware and software hacker/developer ecosystem is both possible and reasonable.

Steve Tomlin's Website

3 Reply by jp

  • jp
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Re: Chumby 2.0?

Hi Steve,
Thanks for your answer.  If I may, I would like to play devil's advocate and suggest that while the open source plan is bold and beautiful, it only makes the device more "hackable".  In my view, that means I can spend a few weekends figuring out how to mount one to a large RC controlled truck that the kids have gotten bored with and amuse my friends and neighbors with it.

What I don't see being addressed is what I would call "repurposing" chumby.  There are dozens of ways that a small, inexpensive internet capable computer with a touch screen could be used in large quantities around the world.  Modifying the device to suit these purposes could be a large and profitable business, since only a small percentage of these uses lend themselves to a leather wrapped "pod" that sits on a desk.  They would need to be wall mounted and mounted in various types of "kiosks".  Then a mountain of proprietary widgets would need to be made for these many various uses.  I'm talking about a several-year long business, rather than hacking for fun and street cred.

There seems to be only one thing that chumby lacks to make it a "repurposer's dream machine"; that being the stability of the hardware design over time.  This might be as simple as picking a few important dimensions and agreeing to keep those fixed for a certain length of time.  It might mean being willing to pay the tooling costs to create a mounting plate that would hold a new smaller chumby in a frame that is the same size and shape as the "classic" chumby.  This should be practical for your company, but would not be practical for a guy making kiosks in his garage.

If, by mentioning that your design is open and available, you were thinking that this makes it practical for this celebrated "guy in the garage" to just start manufacturing his own "Classic chumby" to put in his kiosk, I think you over estimate his resources and abilities.

So, that's my concern.  Is it worth the effort for Chumby to make repurposing the device a practical business?  That's something you'll have to decide.  I'm hoping you decide that it is worth the relatively small cost I've described above.

many thanks,
jp
tinkerer and hopeful chumby repurposer

Many people are concerned about the condition of Politics in America today.  What they don't understand is that the Fathers of our Nation were shooting for maximum comedic value.  In that regard, our system of government has only improved with time. -- Mark Twain (if he were alive today and inhabiting my body)

jp's Website

  • Duane
  • Duane
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  • Registered: 2006-08-24
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Re: Chumby 2.0?

Here's the problem - we don't actually make money on the chumby device, so a "repurposed chumby" at best has us break even, and in fact costs us if we have to keep a manufacturing line open for several years building obsolete models of the device.

If somebody were to make it worth our while to continue to manufacture old models, we'd certainly consider it - you'd need to commit to something on the order of thousands of units a month.

The other problem, of course, is that while *we* could decide to make the same model for years, that doesn't mean our suppliers are going to be making the same parts for that length of time.  As you know, small form factor devices (mobile, etc) have been evolving at a very rapid pace - the device we're putting together for production could not have been made less than a year ago, and some of the parts in the alpha chumby from last August are no longer manufactured by our suppliers.

Our primary market is the mass market, and that market demands rapid evolution. As we learn more and more about what people do and don't want, we'll be adding and removing features to the device.  We can't just sit on some static configuration and allow opportunities for competitors to overtake us - particularly just to enable a third party from whom we make no money.

We recognize that it would be advantageous to have a healthy ecosystem of third-party products available for chumby, and that that requires some level of certainty about the device configuration, and we hope to provide some guidance on what's likely to be stable over time, and what's not.

Duane's Website

  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-29
  • Posts: 159

Re: Chumby 2.0?

Agree with what Duane said.  To be crystal clear, if someone (or some company) had a big idea for a different direction to take the hardware and sufficient resources to build a business around it, we'd love to discuss it.  We've tried to make this clear in our hardware license.  We're very much open for business and want the chumby device to be a "platform."

Steve Tomlin's Website

6 Reply by jp

  • jp
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Re: Chumby 2.0?

Thanks Steve and Duane,
I think there are two really huge opportunities that some properly resourced individual could take advantage of:
1) Chumby could be the "every room" portion of a very cool "house of the future" system
2) Chumby looks like it was custom made (except for the case) to fill the need for inexpensive point of sale "kiosks" that provide product info and a simple UI for getting answers to questions about something in a store.  Imagine selling a few dozen of these to every Wallmart and Target store in the world.

Sadly, at the present moment I don't even have a garage I can call my own.  I have 8.5 acres in Julian to put it on, but the County is forcing me to build a house there before I'm allowed to build a garage.  Arghh.

Anyway, if it's ideas you need, I've got them by the score, but I'm a bit short on the "resources" end of things.  smile

I wish you guys well on what looks like a good idea and a much needed device.  Unfortunately, at the moment I don't see any way I can bootstrap myself into a position to make any money on it from the sidelines.  Maybe on the software side; there's less of a resource issue there, but also some realities that make significant money for developers seem somewhat unlikely.  Right now I'm making good money working at Qualcomm by day and doing Ruby on Rails development at night.  Should eventually pay for my garage and the ancillary house.  smile

cheers,
jp

Many people are concerned about the condition of Politics in America today.  What they don't understand is that the Fathers of our Nation were shooting for maximum comedic value.  In that regard, our system of government has only improved with time. -- Mark Twain (if he were alive today and inhabiting my body)

jp's Website