Topic: Ready to return my Chumby 8

I've been trying to get support for my Chumby 8 with no luck. Perhaps someone will take notice and address the issue of lack of support.

In brief:
Original contact Dec. 8, was told to expect a response in one business day.
After waiting 5 days with no contact, I emailed again to check on status.
Finally got a response on Dec. 13
I responded with the answers to the questions asked on Dec. 15.
Was told to expect a response in one business day.
6 days later I still haven't heard from them.
Emailed again to check on status was told to expect a response in one business day.

If this is what the support model is like, I'm not sure I want to keep this.

Since this device is under warranty and non-functional, I'd like to know the process for a refund.


An upset user.

Re: Ready to return my Chumby 8

Some questions:

1) How many characters in your WEP passphrase?
2) Are there any other characters in your WEP passphrase besides the digits 0 through 9 and the letters A through F?
3) Does your access point have MAC address filtering enabled?
4) Does your access point have a limit on the number of connections?

Re: Ready to return my Chumby 8

Thanks for the help, My answers below.

1) The passphrase has 9 characters. The Key1 has 10 characters. Note that Linksys/Cisco uses the passphrase to generate the Key and this is what is most often used in setting up wireless. Regardless, I tried entering both on both networks to get this to work. No go. I wish the documentation was clearer on this. I did not try entering any of the other three keys that are generated. Should I?

What is a passphrase

2)The passphrase has characters other than A-F, The Key1 does not. Again, both were tried.

3)Mac address filtering has been disabled on both networks I tried to connect to.

4)No limit on the number of connections.

Re: Ready to return my Chumby 8

You definitely want to use the 10 character hex key, not the ASCII passphrase.

There's actually no such thing as an ASCII WEP keyphrase in the WEP specification.  Since hex is rather obscure, several AP vendors create their own mutually incompatible (in the case of Apple, incompatible across even their own devices) algorithms for conversion of ASCII passphrases to hex.  In some cases, the algorithms are secret.

The Chumby device understands *some* of these algorithms, but not all, since some of them are secret. When you enter a WEP passphrase that's not 10 or 26 hex digits, it goes through the list of algorithms it knows about, and if none of them work, it fails.  Obviously, it can't know whether it failed because it didn't have the right algorithm, or *did* have the right algorithm, but you entered the wrong key, so it's hard to generate a useful error message in that case.

You could certainly try some of the other keys, since your Cisco AP should understand all of them.  Chumby devices all work properly with WEP - despite the clearly better security of WPA, WEP is still the most common encryption used in the home, so it gets far and away the most testing by QA, and we get virtually no reports of failures of WEP that don't typically turn out to be something else.

Does the device work on other networks and/or using other encryption methods?

When it fails, precisely what error messages does it show?