• Registered: 2007-05-26
  • Posts: 1

Topic: Just Checking

So I found Chumby in PopSci and just got around to checking it out.  I wanted to confirm some of the features:

Does it play music?  Could you download music off of a program such as iTunes?  Does this music feature still work even if it's not connected to the internet?  Can it still do anything if it's not connected to the internet (obviously it can't get live feeds or anything like that)?  Can I put my pictures onto it?  Will those still work (scroll or whatever they do) if it's not connected to the internet?  Can I still get a clock to work if it's  not connected to the internet? 

Sorry I have so many questions, but if you want to buy a product you have to research it first!  Thanks!

  • Duane
  • Duane
  • Blue Octy
  • Offline
  • From: San Diego, CA
  • Registered: 2006-08-24
  • Posts: 8,211

Re: Just Checking

Well, that's not quite clear yet - the device is designed to run primarily as a widget-playing device, although we're puttin a lot of infrastrucutre in place to play music from various devices.  However, most of this functionality is downloaded from the online service at boot time in order to allow us to make changes and enhancements without having to do a full firmware update, which is an inherently risky this to do.  Unfortunately, this also means that you have to have a running network connection.

We're looking at a bunch of different options - we'll see what ends up in the final product.

One thing to keep in mind that nothing is actually stored *on* the chumby - it's too lightweight a device and is designed from the ground up for network connectivity.  It's not, for instance, an MP3 player - it only has 64MB of storage, and virtually all of that is the read-only filesystem for running the Linux and Flash subsystems.

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