Topic: whats on my chumby 1?

Hi.  I successfully SSHed, but it appears that I only have 400+ mb left on the device.  My understanding is that the chumby shipped with a 2 gig microsd card.  I have not loaded anything on the chumby (except widgets from the site).  can anyone tell me what is on the chumby and what I can delete. 

I am hoping to free up some space to put about 1.5 gigs of mp3s on the device itsself.

2 (edited by ChumbyRoss 2010-05-11 15:34:36)

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

While the chumby does indeed ship with a 2 gig microsd card, most of this is for the file systems. This is actually not meant to be used for end user storage.  Instead, .mp3's must be stored on thumb drives or other usb portable storage for them to be played on the device.

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

Actually, you should have about 1.2 GB free on /mnt/storage to do with whatever you wish.

How did you determine you only had 400MB free?

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

thanks duane

I used the df -h command within putty


chumby:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p3          118.2M     97.1M     15.0M  87% /
tmpfs                    29.3M    596.0k     28.7M   2% /tmp
none                     32.0M     76.0k     31.9M   0% /var
none                     32.0M         0     32.0M   0% /mnt
/dev/mmcblk0p5          122.0M      4.1M    111.8M   4% /psp
/dev/mmcblk0p6          576.8M    200.7M    346.8M  37% /mnt/storage
none                     32.0M     44.0k     32.0M   0% /dev


see the dev/mmcblk0p6 has only 346.8m available.

am I missing something

I am unix illiterate so if I need to delete or move stuff please be specific in how to do so.

thanks

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

Actually, you're doing things exactly right. Your unit probably has a 1 GB microSD card installed in it. A chumby One may ship with many different configurations of microSD firmware, ranging from 512 MB to 4GB or more. It all depends upon what's available at the best price on the market at the time of manufacture. The microSD memory card market is highly volatile and sometimes larger capacity cards can be cheaper than smaller capacity cards, depending upon supply and demand.

The very first batch of chumby Ones shipped with a 2GB card, and a lot of press went out quoting that as a firm spec; it's actually a transient notion. We try to be very careful on our website specs to state that the ROM is an "Internal microSD card firmware" but we don't cite a specific capacity. For normal, non-hacker use of a chumby, the excess space on a microSD card is in fact just empty space that will never be used (internal storage of MP3s is not an officially supported feature of the chumby One), so we take advantage of that to deliver the best cost that we can for the product -- something we have to be very careful about on this product since its selling price is very low compared to the features it includes.

An alternative business model could be to charge the customer for fixed internal memory tiers (as Apple does for different capacities of iPods -- they'll charge you over a 2-3x markup (in some cases as big as 10x) on the actual cost difference for the memory part from one tier to the next) but since we don't actually expose the capacity of the firmware card to non-hacker end users it doesn't make sense to do that.

Since accessing the excess memory on a chumby One requires hacking the device anyways, a more price-friendly way to address the demands of a variable memory market would be for hackers to buy memory cards at market price and install it themselves. Thus, if you wanted to drop in a (1GB/2GB/4GB/8GB/16GB/32GB .. or beyond) card, you can, and you simply pay the true market price for the memory instead of us bundling it into the device and charging a markup on the difference (the markup is necessary in part to protect us against price volatility in the market (contract prices are typically higher than spot prices), and also because it's easy profit to charge for upgrades that consumers won't do themselves at their own risk). On the other hand, it means we don't guarantee what capacity you'll get, so you can't count on that as a fixed spec for the device. We do guarantee that it is a fully functional chumby One as we've designed it to be, without any guarantee on nice-to-have enhancements that a hacker may or may not attempt to employ.

Hope that clarifies the confusion...

7BAA 2E53 01C1 DCFF 497B  E7F0 9699 A303 78F0 D9B9

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

Bunnie,

Thanks for the explanation for the size of Micro SD cards in the chumby ones.  I think what you guys are doing at Chumby is awesome and thanks for all the many things you do to help us hacker/developers.

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

I also thought it might be helpful to give a market-oriented historical perspective about the microSD card, for those who are curious about how this whole thing works.

Flash prices are volatile because the fabrication facilities ("fabs") that make the chips run at a constant capacity. You can't simply turn them off when demand goes away; furthermore, they are optimized to be profitable when running at near peak capacity. A fab running at half-full typically loses money due to the fixed overhead of running the equipment -- for example, the vacuum chambers must be extremely pristine, so even if a wafer isn't in the machine at the time the vacuum is always being pumped; allowing ambient, dirty air into the chamber would be disastrous. Furthermore, the cost of the blank silicon wafer itself is only about 10% the cost of a chip -- the other 90% is in the consumables, depreciation, and fixed costs of operation. Thus, when sales are slow, a fab will still make Flash memory even if there's no demand, because you lose less money selling chips at a loss than selling no chips at all. This causes a glut and drives prices down. On the other hand, if demand outstrips supply, prices quickly shoot up because it's virtually impossible to quickly increase a fab's capacity. Because the equation has fixed supply and variable demand, even small percentage differences between supply and demand tend to integrate over time and can lead to a massive market shortfall or glut. The situation is analogous to the supply and demand of oil. However, in semiconductors, pricing anomalies are compounded by Moore's law -- every time fabs shrink their process you get more memory for the same price as before, but not all vendors switch over at the same time.

The "spec" size for a chumby One firmware is less than 512 MB. Therefore, as designed, we should be able to fit into any microSD card that is 512MB or larger. Back when the chumby One launched, 512 MB memory cards were being phased out; they had shrunk the process to the point where it was no longer economical to make 512 MB cards, so 1 GB was the sweet spot. Because 1 GB was the sweet spot, a lot of large companies had contracted for large amounts of 1 GB flash. As the holiday season neared, excess consumer demand outstripped supply and drove 1 GB prices above that of 2 GB prices by about 10-20%. Thus, last holiday season, it was cheaper to ship chumby Ones with 2 GB memory cards than pay market price for 1 GB cards. Now that the holiday season is over, 1 GB card demand has dropped and prices have dropped; furthermore, my intelligence reports that a major fab has just shrunk their process, which may drive that cost even lower if demand doesn't pick up too quickly.

As I look forward to the conclusion of 2010, it's possible 2 GB cards will cross-over the 1 GB cards again; also, it's extremely unlikely that we would ever go to a 512MB size. By 2011 it's possible that 4 GB cards will cross-over as well. However, one thing is sure: this year will be very volatile for memory pricing -- all indicators show that the consumer economy is recovering and the semiconductor industry is signaling that it won't keep up with demand this year. It's currently May and certain markets are already starting show signs of a buying frenzy in preparation for the fourth quarter. Good for your 401(k), bad for chumby -- the rise in market price for raw goods will come out of our operating income. Hopefully that will be offset by any net volume increase of sales, assuming we can even get the material to build units to offer for sale. Unfortunately, we're a runt at a trough that feeds the likes of Nokia, HTC, Apple...

Due to the massive price volatility in the market, many larger consumers of Flash will negotiate fixed-price contracts. I've seen contract pricing go higher than 2x over spot pricing, so it can be a very bad deal at times (I've also seen it go the other way as well...). This is also partially why, for example, Apple will charge you 2-5x over memory cost for offering you an iPod at a higher capacity (don't even get me started on the iPad price curve...), even though technologically speaking the change is as simple as swapping out one memory chip for another. That, and the fact that it's an easy way to increase profits by segmenting the market along a simple and easy to understand consumer metric: most consumers agree with the idea of paying more for more memory because it allows them to store more songs. However, on a chumby, more memory gets you actually nothing because we have no UI mechanism for you to copy MP3s onto your device. Instead, the idea is that you use Pandora or Shoutcast to access unlimited music from the cloud. Of course, if on a future product we introduced the notion of UI-visible storage partition, we would be obligated to ship only one size of memory card, no larger and no smaller.

It might also be worth noting that the fact that MP3s show up on internal storage at all in a chumby One UI would normally be considered a bug by most companies since it is an unsupported feature -- especially since it can cause trouble down the road if we do an update that wipes the storage partition (we'd like to avoid doing that if possible but technically it's an option because the storage partition is an unsupported feature, allocated primarily for temporary files and developer use), or it can cause consumers who try to access it to be surprised or dismayed when they find that the size is actually variable, which admittedly, is a strange concept in the CE market place and requires a lot of explanation to understand.

7BAA 2E53 01C1 DCFF 497B  E7F0 9699 A303 78F0 D9B9

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

Thanks for that. It's always interesting to read a good clear explanation of something that you've never thought about before.

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

thanks bunnie for a very thorough explanation.  I had read that the chumby 1 shipped with 1 gig and 2 gig cards.  I also understand the risk of storage and updates. 

In terms of the hardware hack, is it a matter of just unscrewing the back, finding the card and pulling it out and replacing it.  or is there soldering involved and stuff like that.

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

Image of the card slot:
http://s1.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/N … snU3.large

Main tear down article:
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/chumby-o … own/1614/1

FWIW: I have the same size sd as you aquinnuvm.

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

You'll also have to image the new card, since all of the firmware is on the card - it won't boot without it.

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

aquinnuvm wrote:

/dev/mmcblk0p6          576.8M    200.7M    346.8M  37% /mnt/storage
none                     32.0M     44.0k     32.0M   0% /dev


see the dev/mmcblk0p6 has only 346.8m available.

/$ df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p3          118.2M     97.1M     15.0M  87% /
tmpfs                    29.3M    596.0k     28.7M   2% /tmp
none                     32.0M     76.0k     31.9M   0% /var
none                     32.0M         0     32.0M   0% /mnt
/dev/mmcblk0p5          122.0M     14.4M    101.5M  12% /psp
/dev/mmcblk0p6            1.4G     71.7M      1.3G   5% /mnt/storage
none                     32.0M     44.0k     32.0M   0% /dev


it seems i have a 2GB card inside

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

You can upgrade the SD card by simply replacing it.  You'll first need to prep it, though, by writing the ROM image to the card.  We have ROM 1.0.3 up, which will do, but it will need to update after you power it up.

Here's how you can write the ROM image to a bigger card on Windows.

  1. Download the ROM file

  2. Unzip it to somewhere, say, your desktop

  3. Plug the SD card you're going to upgrade to in a USB reader, and plug it into your computer

  4. Download win32diskimager and unzip it

  5. Open win32diskimager, select the ROM image, and write it to the card

  6. Replace the SD card in the chumby One with the newly-written card

You'll lose settings like touchscreen calibration and network configs, as well as anything you had on /mnt/storage/, but it'll be recreated and resized such that /mnt/storage/ will take up the remainder of the drive.  On a 1G card, it'll be about 400 megs, on a 16G card it'll be about 1500.

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

Thanks chumbylurker.

I got a 4 gig card to day.  but win32diskimager wont let me write the image to the card.  any ideas?  cards good.

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

Wow, what an amazingly informative thread! Indeed, I have a 2gb card in mine. I've wondered why it comes with a 2gb card and no UI to do anything with it. Actually makes sense to not expose it to the user, or even really use it for storage (although some sort of cache would certainly be nice), given that the capacity is subject to change.

As for me, I could not tolerate having a USB drive dedicated to nothing but storing music, when the Chumby itself has a 2gb card in it sitting empty. I added a music folder and copied a few hundred megs of MP3s to it, which I use as my alarm clock in the morning (Pandora is too unreliable and it often falls back to the buzzer/backup). I use pscp through sshd to transfer MP3s onto it over the network (I call that batch file "chumbysmash.cmd"). But even without a GUI for storage, dammit, I want to see metadata on the song that's playing!! Can't be that hard to implement... wink

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

@aquinnuvm: You need to have the USB drive with the SD card already plugged into your desktop when you open win32diskimager.  If you plug it in after you've opened it, the drive letter won't show up.

Re: whats on my chumby 1?

Srry to bump the thread... but could I just copy the files from the sd card my chumby shipped with on to a new micro sd card or do I need to install the rom?