There is no RS232 port on the chumby.

There is an internal TTL-level serial port on the motherboard of the device, just behind the upper right corner of the display.  Those of us that use it typically have the screen module loose and use a TTL-RS232 adaptor such as this one connected to a 4-pin header soldered into the pads.

The serial port is exposed as a row of five holes along the upper right - what you do is solder in a 4 or 5 pin header (the innermost pin isn't used) and then the cable I listed will just attach to it.  On my development chumby, I route the cable out though the opening in the bottom, then attach it to a USB serial adapter, then to my Mac. Actually, on mine, I didn't solder in the header - if you stick some tape in a particular position, you can more or less use the pressure to hold the header it without soldering.

The cool thing about using the serial port is that you can watch the device boot and get access to the device much earlier - very useful when debugging the kernel, various scripts, or the wifi.

I'm not sure the current firmware release supports USB serial, however, I know the next one does, since Henry has spent a bunch of time adding and tweaking the kernel drivers for the various common chipsets.

For those of us in other countries (e.g. Australia...where you can't buy Chumbies...mmmm), there's an alternative cable.

FTDI make a cable stocked by various shops, incl Dontronics.com (Australia).  Its around $20USD.

You'll find a list of stockists and details here :-
http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/Evalua … 2R-3V3.htm

This cable won't go in pin for pin onto the chumby.
All you have to do is extract 3 pins from the existing header (Yellow, Orange & Black) and hook them onto a 0.1" 4 pin header in the following order.

Yellow, Orange, No-wire, Black

Yellow goes in the "TX" pin of the Chumby.  As Duane said, you can probably get away with not soldering the header onto the chumby if you just position it right which is what I'm doing now

In windows, Putty set to 38400 baud works a treat   Have fun with the chumby console!

Edit : Doesn't need drivers in XP/Vista/Ubuntu...or if you do just download from ftdi site

I think Duane answered elsewhere 'not at the moment' though they're considering something...and the only path now is to compile your own http daemon to handle the serial coms and provide XML to the flash widget...

I have a project that might result in the sale of up to 500 chumbys, what is the timeframe to have a firmware release that will support any USB-Serial connections.

I need to decide whether to wait for that release or to go the hardwired route internally.

I would never call you fat........thanks for all of the info on this.

What is the recommended way to stop the kernel messages and terminal on the built in serial port so it can be used for other purposes?

Hi ChumbyLurker, thanks for the tip. 2 follow ups however.

1) I'm not sure I understand, from your link it looks like you're suggesting that sending a serial break will make the terminal and log messages go away but I've tried that and it seems to have no effect.

2) What I was really hoping for was a programmatic way to do this, something I could do over SSH or via a debugchumby script without having to hook a computer to the serial port after each boot. And again I'm trying to get rid of both the kernel messages AND the shell.

Thanks in advance.

Thanks, that takes care of the kernel messages but there is still a TTY (console) running on the serial port. When I list processes none of them look like TTY's to me so I don't know what to kill to get rid of it.