• miker
  • New member
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  • Registered: 2012-02-29
  • Posts: 1

Topic: best chumby hardware available?

I have had the first original chumby released reliably working every day with no issues. Right now it's in my sons room acting as a white noise generator. The screen quality is not the best and I am considering upgrading to a newer, fancier type. I see there are many desktop options to choose from. Can someone recommend a model to replace what I have now? It will be acting as a picture frame, twitter feed reader and weather display so screen resolution should be good, speed should be ok and capacitive touch would be nice if possible.

Thanks,
Mike

  • Registered: 2012-02-07
  • Posts: 535

Re: best chumby hardware available?

For a picture frame, you should consider the Chumby 8 (or its relatives, the Infocast 8 and WowBox 8) -- this gives you an 8" screen at 800x600 as opposed to the 3.5" at 320x240 on the Classic and Chumby One.  All Chumby-family devices have resistive touch screens to my knowledge, so you're out of luck on the capacitive touch screen (capacitive screens are more expensive hardware-wise, I believe, and one of the main points of a Chumby is to keep the price low).

I personally would recommend against the Sony Dash, as it's much more locked down in terms of tweakability as well as channel availability, and the service is supported (heh, right) by Sony, rather than Chumby.  I do believe Chumby supports the service for the three brands I listed (though the manufacturers are responsible for hardware support)... Duane will probably correct me if I'm wrong on this wink

In its favor, the Dash does support Netflix I believe, as well as some other DRM-based media services (which is part of the reason for it being locked down).  For your purposes though, it sounds like you might be better off with a device running the standard Chumby service (Chumby, Infocast, or WowBox).

Alternatively, you can get an Android tablet with whatever screen resolution and touch capability your heart desires, and load the Chumby app on it smile

  • bobsz
  • Blue Buddy
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  • From: Long Beach NY
  • Registered: 2011-01-01
  • Posts: 546

Re: best chumby hardware available?

All other issues aside, photos look great on my Chumby 8. Long may our servers wave.

I know a lot of folks are suggesting cheap android devices on these forums, a good idea in a practical sense. But other than the Chumby, I'd say buy a picture frame if you want a picture frame. You know, even Google's innocent OS isn't so innocent. Download anything from their app store, and you provide info and lose more privacy in return. Same with Android alarm clocks. Do you really want Google to know when you oversleep?! Of course, this would have sounded absurd a year ago, but March 1 - today -  starts Google's Great Convergence. That policy makes for pretty scary reading. And most "free" Android apps do more data mining than anything we'd have called "malware" a couple of years ago.

I'm just really appreciating my Chumbies, for however long that may be!