Topic: Chumby and Satellite internet

Hi Guys,

I just got a Chumby for my wife yesterday.  The good news is she warmed up to it right away.  The bad news is that we have satellite Internet and we are only allowed ~150 MB a day before they turn on their "Fair Access Policy" or FAP.  This throttles back your speed to something along the lines of a 300 baud modem.
We got FAPed already today, and as far as I can tell she has not used any high bandwidth widgets.  The only one that seems at all suspect is the myspace widget.

Is the Chumby a bad match for folks with a limited amount of Internet connectivity?   Is there a way to see what widgets are the "hogs".  Also, it seems to download the control panel each time it is fired up, how big is that?

--Matthew

2 (edited by Materdaddy 2008-05-30 21:05:22)

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

There's plenty of software to track network activity.  You have lots of options for your problem.

First, you can use another wireless device that can be set to "promiscuous" mode.  This means you can listen to traffic not destined for your IP address.  Then you can use packet analyzing software like "wireshark" (formerly ethereal) and see how much traffic is going from your chumby to the outside world.

The other option would be to use a hub (not a switch or router) somewhere in the network between your wireless router and the satellite internet modem.  Then you can use a desktop machine's internet interface, again, in promiscuous mode to listen to the traffic.

If you are proficient in linux, I guess you could also run tcpdump or other network tools on the chumby itself, and have it monitor all traffic to a terminal, remote machine or maybe even a USB stick.

Also, if you have a "hackable" router (linksys wrt54g, lots of buffalo routers) you can put pfsense, openwrt, ddwrt on it to monitor/log traffic and count bandwidth used by certain machines.

All of these should work, and there's probably 10 other methods you could use as well.  I'm sure with some googling you can figure out what method you want to use, and if you need any help with something a little more specific, post detailed questions!

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

Perfect.  My router is running ddwrt.  Where is the total bandwidth by ip?  I have been unable to find it.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

I don't actually use ddwrt, but it looks like (from a google search), that it's under the last tab, Status, then under Bandwidth.

I'm wondering if ddwrt is like openwrt where you can install extra packages, which has some bandwidth functionality.  If I had a second device, I'd change openwrt to ddwrt on my router and give it a shot.  Maybe somebody else can chime in and give you some pointers.

Linux Guy - Occasional Chumby Hacker

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

I have setup a Chumby device at my Mother's home. There is only one device on the network in her home, that is, an Infocast 8 (I8). I was hoping she could use my FreedomPop account, which is limited to 500MB of data usage (bandwidth). Apparently, after using a "channel"(?) of only three widgets (NOAA Weather Widget, Chumby Time Widget, and a the Elment Table Day of the Week Widget) we are at about >120MB of usage after just over a 24h period.

With the above in mind, my Mother is primarily interested in the clock function only. I was hoping the Chumby was not too much of a "data hog" (heh).

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

Kurtois wrote:

I have setup a Chumby device at my Mother's home. There is only one device on the network in her home, that is, an Infocast 8 (I8). I was hoping she could use my FreedomPop account, which is limited to 500MB of data usage (bandwidth). Apparently, after using a "channel"(?) of only three widgets (NOAA Weather Widget, Chumby Time Widget, and a the Elment Table Day of the Week Widget) we are at about >120MB of usage after just over a 24h period.

With the above in mind, my Mother is primarily interested in the clock function only. I was hoping the Chumby was not too much of a "data hog" (heh).

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

1. Plug a FAT32 formatted flash drive (At least 128 MB in size) into your computer. If you already have a flash drive for your Chumby with music or other files, and it has at least 128 MB in free space, it'll also work just fine.

2. Make a new folder in the root of your flash drive called "widgetcache", but without the quotes.

The widgets will be downloaded once, and stored in the folder. However, the weather app, and presumably the Element of the Day app, are internet-connected, meaning that they will use data regardless. Maybe putting the widgets on a slower rotation would help, or making separate channels.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

Kurtois wrote:

I have setup a Chumby device at my Mother's home. There is only one device on the network in her home, that is, an Infocast 8 (I8). I was hoping she could use my FreedomPop account, which is limited to 500MB of data usage (bandwidth). Apparently, after using a "channel"(?) of only three widgets (NOAA Weather Widget, Chumby Time Widget, and a the Elment Table Day of the Week Widget) we are at about >120MB of usage after just over a 24h period.

With the above in mind, my Mother is primarily interested in the clock function only. I was hoping the Chumby was not too much of a "data hog" (heh).

Any thoughts or suggestions are welcome.

the noaa weather widget pulls down a fair amount of data from noaa every time it comes up.... though I don't know offhand how much.

Cleaning up any loose bits and bytes.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

The NOAA widget is about 128K and the data file it downloads is another 16K.   The Periodic Dable 2 widget is 180K, but doesn't download anything else from the net.  It's just using the day number to index into the periodic table.  I wouldn't expect a time widget to download anything.

The Infocast 8 has some Flash storage space, so it should already be caching the widgets that are displayed.  My I8 (running the Chumby 8 software) has about 1.5M used in /mnt/storage/widgetcache.  Maybe the original Infocast control panel wasn't updated for caching.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

Not sure how she's getting 120MB/day unless she's listening to music.

Devices start showing up on our "top bandwidth users" list when they do about 5MB/day - of course this doesn't count hits to non-chumby servers that widgets might make.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

This is great information! Thank you! However, I may have "cried wolf", potentially.

Let me review the data usage again from FreedomPop and report back. I think my baseline may have been off. I apologize.

RE: her usage; she is a non-technical person. She lets me set it up and she never touches it.

Note: I have kept the widgets configured as I mentioned, i.e. Chumby clock, Periodic Table Day of the Week, and NOAA Weather Widget.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

Something must be up with FreedomPop's data usage accounting.

A couple of days ago, my usage was 114MB total usage. Now, it is at 184MB. Again, the only device connected to this wireless hotspot is the Chumby. I asked FreedomPop support for them to review the accounting. My review of the transaction history they provide does not appear to add up correctly.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

Turn off the device for a couple of days to see what the effect is.

I think you can also get an idea what the total traffic on the device is by opening up a browser to the IP of the device and loading the stats.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

FWIW, when I got my first Chumby I was on a 400MB per month data plan (yes, that's MB, and yes, that's per month!).
I was a bit careful about its data use - I'd put it into night mode whenever I wasn't around and I didn't play music - but I could fit a few hours a day of Chumby clocks, news headlines and weather into this data plan OK on top of my other web use.

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

I also have the same problem and i am glad to see that it had been solved.

15 (edited by Kurtois 2015-02-16 16:23:17)

Re: Chumby and Satellite internet

Out of curiosity, does anyone know of a way to restrict a device's total usage to some amount of data for a month?

I am thinking of a router configuration running on some custom firmware, but am open to ideas.