• From: Vegas Baby
  • Registered: 2007-12-13
  • Posts: 13

Topic: External monitor out to use the chumby as a digital picture frame

I am thinking that the Chumby is better at doing "wifi digital picture frame" behavior better than any of the dedicated digital picture frames on the market today, so I am thinking if we can come up with a way to get video out to an external monitor we could use the chumby as a digital picture frame.

Has anyone out there done this, or have any ideas on how to get the video on to a monitor?
Cause for $180 for the chumby and $99 for a 17" LCD you could have a really nice digital picture frame.

Plus we could write other applications/widgets for the Chumby which we can't do with dedicated digital picture frames.
Think things like changing the "photo album" that is on display from your wifi enabled PDA or cell phone.
So if you had a party the night before and set your "my wild friends album" to display and your mom comes over you can change to the family pictures real quick.

There are probably a few other applications we could come up with, especially if you incorporate an Asterisk PBX, a motion detector, security cameras, or other home automation integration.

  • From: Singapore
  • Registered: 2006-08-26
  • Posts: 188

Re: External monitor out to use the chumby as a digital picture frame

Probably the most seamless way to do this, from the software standpoint, is to build a device that plugs into the LCD connector on the chumby that then scan converts and renders the frame buffer into NTSC. It's not a small project to do this but it certainly is possible. It would also require opening up your chumby. The full speed USB port on the chumby probably does not have the performance necessary to practically stream video to an output device.

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  • alexo
  • New member
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  • Registered: 2009-06-06
  • Posts: 2

Re: External monitor out to use the chumby as a digital picture frame

Guys:

I just came across this thread.  I have been thinking along the same lines for wifi digital picture frame.  However, I would propose a blue tooth solution instead. I have seen documentation out on the web that supports this idea. What do you think?
I have requests for displaying web content on an external monitor. But I do not want to hack chumby at the moment.

  • Registered: 2008-06-27
  • Posts: 518

Re: External monitor out to use the chumby as a digital picture frame

The kernel module for the SIS USB video card is enabled in the chumby One.  The big problem is that it shows up as an SVGA device, not as a framebuffer.  So the only way to talk to it is through svgalib or X11.