Topic: Mismanaged Source Tree
It is really too bad that the Chumby Source Tree was never properly maintained when the Hacker Board was created. The Chumby Hacker board is competitively priced, and could have been a serious option for embedded systems engineers, if chumby had treated it as more than just a toy. It's hardware is superior to many other commercial embedded systems, but doesn't have the professional level of source code management required to promote reliable commercial use. I had hoped that it would be reliable with the existing drivers, and included modules, but such is not the case. I can run the same program 4 times, and sometimes it will run perfectly, and other times it will crash with unfixable errors in the USB serial port, drivers. Over and Over I keep running into the same problem. The source code on the published web site does not match up with the version of the code in the binary rom falconwing image. This makes it essentially impossible to correct problems, and maintain a reliable code base. If the developers of the Chumby Hacker Board would simply use any of the many available Version Control systems (CVS, git, Subversion, mercurial) to create stable releases of the full source tree to match each binary code version, then none of these problems would be plaguing the Chumby Community. Most of the complaints, and problem reports on this forum can be traced back to this single bad managerial decision. Now that I realize the scope of the codebase inconsistencies, I have to scrap my entire investment in Chumby, and switch to a more reliable, and professional embedded system platform. Such a shame! I really fell in love with the Chumby hardware, and it's price performance matrix is better than any other embedded platform for my needs. But without supported, reliable maintainable software it might as well be made of stone.
If you can locate all of the original source code team, and all of the original code fragments, I can show you how to set up a
version tracking repository that will solve all of these issues, and would be willing to donate some time to help Chumby fix this problem for good. But if there is no interest from management on down, then there is no way to save the Chumby Hacker Board from a doomed fate of neglected support and obscurity.