Topic: Send messages home/to chumby.

Since Chumby is almost always on. It's audio is also on.

I was wondering if there is a way to send messages which can show up on chumby. Also play an audio announcing arrival of the new message.

Once should be able to send messages using another chumby, or SMS or email, or just by web browser from phone. and/or desktop.

This should not be too hard. Just need a server support from chumby.

There is no device like this in the market yet.

What do you say ?

Re: Send messages home/to chumby.

There is an app called "Notes".  It doesn't exactly allow you to send messages directly to other chumbys from the app itself.   But if you have multiple chumbys registered under one account, then the messages you create and save will sync up with all of them.  No audio though.

Re: Send messages home/to chumby.

I agree that it would be very nice to be able to display a message on the Chumby. I am not so interested in e-mail or most other methods, but rather through Sending events to the Control Panel. This would allow me to display messages through a web page or other applications.

Re: Send messages home/to chumby.

There is a Gmail viewer widget. If you set up a gmail account specifically for the chumby, then by using this widget, you would have a way of sending messages to that chumby only. Still no audio though.
I can see where you're going with this idea though. Something that brought the message to the attention of the recipient, and displayed it in big text readable from a bit of a distance, would be a pretty cool thing.
It could perhaps be done by modifying the gmail viewer to just display the latest message in much larger text, and then having a gmail account just for chumby messages.
Then as you were leaving work you could send the chumby an email saying "Leaving now" and those at home would see it and start preparing refreshing drinks and delightful little snacks ready for your arrival.

Re: Send messages home/to chumby.

I suppose that would be nice to be able to send an e-mail. What I am suggesting might be a message getting displayed indicating the Internet is down (or other similar things). I have done this with many other devices using TCP, UDP, and/or HTTP.

Re: Send messages home/to chumby.

It seems like the display of the text could be accomplished with an overlay very similar to the method used with clockoverlay.xml. It would be nice to be able to specify how long (how many seconds) to overlay the text as well as to be able to automatically center horizontal and/or vertical. I also noticed another way to very temporarily display text with fbwrite. The only issue that I could see is that I seem to have to do a "killall chumbyflashplayer.x" to re-read the file (unless someone knows another way to do this).

Re: Send messages home/to chumby.

Is there a way to tell chumbyflashplayer.x to re-read the clockoverlay.xml instead of killing it so it restarts?

Re: Send messages home/to chumby.

I'm playing with peer-to-peer in the new Flash.  You could network real and virtual chumbys via the user account and get real time messaging.  It would be really slick as long as you didn't need guaranteed / deferred delivery.

Re: Send messages home/to chumby.

If I could find out how to have chumbyflashflayer re-read the clockoverlay, that would suit my needs very well. I actually have seen something that allowed real-time chatting. I guess that was as a group only, not necessarily more personal. I really do not care to do that.

Re: Send messages home/to chumby.

Is there a way to tell chumbyflashplayer.x to re-read the clockoverlay.xml instead of killing the flash player so it restarts?