Re: Power

chedabob wrote:

guys, if you want something portable, buy a pda. chumby doesnt have that much processing power.

Actually, the chumby's Freescale MX21 processor is running at 266MHz. That's a decent amount of processing power for many applications (my last PDA, one of the old Palms, was running at 33MHz, IIRC).

But, I agree that if you want something portable, for now you'll have to hack your chumby to not require the wallwart smile

Have fun,

Joe

27 (edited by chedabob 2006-08-30 10:05:15)

Re: Power

the psp has a 333mhz processor, and even thats not powerful by pda standards. 266mhz would have been good a few years back, but not now. my phone runs with a 233mhz processor, and its not capable of very much. about the most advanced thing it can do is emulate the sega master system.

chumby is powerful enough for what it is. it isnt a pda.

need upload space for the forums or a chumby blog? right here then
http://www.nophus.com/useru
username is chumby
password is chumby

Re: Power

Bump to say I added simple battery charging circuit. If you've got any errata to add to it, please let me know before someone blows up a Chumby. [disclaimer: don't use if if you don't know what you're doing!!!! It may be incorrect!!!]

I intend to test it as soon as the batteries arrive to test it with. This might turn out to be a handy circuit for other projects...

Re: Power

awalton...

Be sure to post up your results. I'll be really interested if you get it to work. Quite a few of my chumby visions rely on battery capability.

Also....I think people need to keep in my mind that at its most basic level the chumby is an alarm clock alternative...then we have the ability to wirelessly download and read brief content....that's what it does!

Beyond that it is what we as a community make it! Stop focusing on what it isn't but on what it could be. Then lets get together and move it forward....

(That said I know we are all trying to get our heads around what the exact hardware is and why it is the way it is...be tolerant of those who may still be missing a piece of the puzzle...this is all pretty new...)

Re: Power

awalton--the battery charger circuit looks neat. I haven't reviewed it in detail, but it looks neat at first glance.

One thing of note, perhaps a battery charger would be best put on the daughtercard board. It's cheaper to prototype it there. One could in fact imagine selling kits for chumbys that would allow people to retrofit their chumbys with a new daughtercard and lithium ion battery packs. The up-front investment for that would be small, perhaps a couple hundred bucks, and each unit could be sold at a palatable price. The electronics would probably cost around $20, although the price of the Li-Ion battery pack would be the big thing. I did see some replacement i-Pod Li-Ion battery packs for sale at compUSA the other day that I almost bought, and they are around $30-$40 each. So, $50-$60 cost on an upgrade kit, and the margin would be yours to set. smile

This is opposed to the several thousand for respinning the core electronics board, and a cost well in excess of $200 to retrofit your chumby in the volumes you'd hit initially selling these.

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

Re: Power

I've been planning a lot of different circuits, this was just the quickest one to implement (as I knew exactly where to do it; there are a lot of chips here and it's taking some time to realize how they all work in concert, though I have a general feel of the land). To put it quite simply, I haven't studied the daughter card as extensively as I've studied the mainboard, but, the chip is quite flexible so it should be well suited to being relocated (though I'll have to rebuild the filter assembly on the daughtercard as the chip needs a filtered power supply; the input voltage and current requirements for the Lithium Ion cells need to be charged within a 1% threshold to maximize life and prevent from disasters). The only problem will figuring out where to put it; I'm still quite lost on how the daughtercard/HSP is supposed to work, and if you've got an updated schematic on that I'd be quite grateful.

The new cells I picked are raw battery cells (they're what would actually be used to build a laptop battery, for example), 2400mA at 3.7V, and the best part is, they're cheap, $6-7 per single cell. Two cells and you're within the 5V-14V frame of reference (7.4V minus losses) for battery operation. The whole package prices out quite nicely.

Re: Power

you could make chumby with a removable battery pack, for charging sepearately (like the xbox 360 quick charge station). so that if you need a bit extra power, just grab the pack, plug it in and go. otherwise, if you only need about 30 mins useage (like for watching a flash animation or something) you dont have to carry the extra wait.

need upload space for the forums or a chumby blog? right here then
http://www.nophus.com/useru
username is chumby
password is chumby

Re: Power

As the design currently is, the battery is removable (because of the clever fall-over chip that is present on Chumby that automatically selects the wired power over the battery whenever possible). However, designing the battery pack and an external charger would still be necessary (and in my opinion, evil; I like my batteries replaceable, but integrated).

Re: Power

I just realized that the daughtercard schematics and PCB layouts are NOT on the website. That is an oversight, and I am working to fix that. It is included on the CD that is packed with every chumby unit but obviously those who do not have access to a chumby will not get this content.

It may take a couple of days because I need to figure out the process for editting web content internally, as the customer-visible website is not something I have ready access to.

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

Re: Power

Ah-ha, no wonder I was having such a time figuring out what was the HSP and which was the Daughtercard.. they're two different things!

Re: Power

yeah, sorry about that...i'm now trying to figure out this ruby stuff and interfacing with the SVN client for the web server. I'm trying to set up direct access to the server so I can add content without having to translate through two people to get there, but don't hold your breath just yet--long weekend coming up and I'm going to a friends' wedding out east. I should have this worked out by mid next week.

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

Re: Power

I have to agree, many of the ideas that I've had for hacking the Chumby have involved portability. Frankly it saddens me that it's not already capable. But we can't have everything packed for us.
I don't have ANY use for an alarm clock though. I hate the things. If I want to wake up, I do. And if I don't, I'll just have wasted $150 bucks on plastic bits strewn across the floor after I smashed the Chumby in my sleep. However, grabbing Google News is promising.
Kits would be a great bonus though. I'm mainly a computer guy, though I am planning on transitioning my degree more into electrical engineering and computer engineering, and having a kit to help me partially along the way would be a godsend.
But I'm sorry, when awalton mentioned getting a bunch of Chumbies together, I didn't think soccer, I thought Chumbywulf cluster! tongue After all, it is Linux.

Re: Power

^^

thats what i was thinking : a great big folding@home cluster, for when chumbies (is that the correct plural spelling?) are idle.

oh, and whoever mentioned Chumby Cook Book, its a bad idea. food and touch screens dont mix tongue

need upload space for the forums or a chumby blog? right here then
http://www.nophus.com/useru
username is chumby
password is chumby

Re: Power

re: not having portable power. One salient, good example in my mind of why we avoid this on chumby is the Li-Ion battery return debacle that Apple and Dell are going through. I just sent in a power book battery that probably costs as much as a chumby--maybe more--and Apple is doing that for me free of charge. And the lawsuits over iPod batteries dying, and the fact that Li-Ion really is only rated for a couple hundred charge-discharge cycles......on laptops, probably the two most failure prone items are batteries and hard drives. Every laptop I've ever owned has gone through at least one set of each.

This is not to mention the extra $20-$40 the whole portable/mobile thing might add to a chumby's cost to the end customer.

Any of these hardware problems resulting in a recall or a mass-return would wipe Chumby Industries out! And companies like Apple, Dell, and IBM/Lenovo have much more extensive testing and QA departments than our little startup...it's a similar line of reasoning that eliminates features like bluetooth from the baseline feature set. We can't afford hardware returns because of bluetooth interoperability bugs--the margins just aren't there to do that. Chumby as a platform has to be robust to sell with razor-thin margins, and one method for getting there is to provide all the features you need and nothing more. The beauty of a connected content-player though, is that the *real* features that make people love the chumby are delivered through the internet from our servers so there is much less cost for providing people with a very featureful and capable content service.

As I said before, chumby is open so I don't feel too bad about not including certain very neat client hardware features that appeal to select customers. Quite likely those who demand portability will be satisfied by any number of small businesses that start up to explicitly provide upgrade kits and features to extend the chumby platform. Or, possibly, chumby may offer some day very far down the road "deluxe" versions that have PDA-like features at PDA-like prices, but not everyone can afford a $300-$400 chumby.

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

Re: Power

I can fully understand the reasoning behind not making Chumby a portable device. Shaving a few watts off occasionally as it exits alpha might be nice for those that want it to be that though, and are willing to void their warranty to make it such, or would like to put it in their car, which would eventually kill the battery. Or perhaps offer a portable option with a future model.
For example, I might want to sit at the table and eat my breakfast while looking at google news, or some other news or daily updated online resource like a web comic, or perhaps just e-mail. Same with being able to sit in the living room and look at various web fetching widgets without worrying that my battery might die every few weeks of just moving it from one room to the next, and plugging it in every time.

The Apple recall though, as I understand it, is actually a Sony recall, seeing as they were Sony batteries. In such a case I would imagine Sony's hurting more than Apple or Dell. I would HOPE Sony isn't letting those companies take the brute force of the kick.

Re: Power

bunnie wrote:

re: not having portable power. One salient, good example in my mind of why we avoid this on chumby is the Li-Ion battery return debacle that Apple and Dell are going through.

Funny...this is what has been playing on my brain too. Seeing I am interested in the craft aspect primarily the last thing I want to do is wake up to a chumby fireball on my bedside. Did you hear that Maxtor external HDs allegedly have some issues too?

My solution? A chumby for each room of the house in decorator colours, of course. tongue

Someone said chumby would have power in numbers...
"I am chumby seven of nine...resistance is futile...i am waaay too cute".

Re: Power

Hey, first post, and I can shed some light on this.
I happen to be an active member on the Benheck.com forums, which specializes in making portable consoles (ie, nesp's, ps2p's, etc and so on) Adding a battery to a chumby wouldn't be too hard. I personally think it would be pretty easy, and thats what I plan to do when I get one.
Also, @ the F@H post, I doubt the chumby has enough ram to handle the WU stamford hands out. Sorry.

Re: Power

Here's an idea: make an adapter so a variety of mobile phone batteries can be used to power the Chumby? Never heard of one of them blowing up!

Regarding portability, I suspect at the moment there may be a 50/50 split between those happy to plonk a Chumby on their desk/side-table and those who immediately want to take it with them where ever they go. I admit that the latter group may be best served with wifi-enable mobile phones but I also suspect that a significant percentage of the former will quickly want to carry it with them (even if just around the house). In general I think the current approach is correct, ie, keep things focused and get something (anything) to market as quickly as possible and then think about the next version/s, including a portable one.

Can't help comparing the business model with the Cybiko whose market should have been huge (I can't complain though since a bought a bunch of them for a fiver each last year - lol). Why they failed is anyones guess but I still believe it was and is a great device. These days there are a large number of devices that *almost* fit the bill to one extent or another. Probably the most noteworthy is the GPX2 (http://www.gp2x.co.uk/) which I mention only for comparison as I have no connection with them.

Re: Power

I though that was a wickedly devious idea too...create a device that plugs in...people want portability...so release a second portable device while the buzz is still there...and people buy 2 chumbies not one...increase your profits...particularly the consumers who like to buy their gear in a store rather than go online and find a third-party company's product...or sell the base chumby for $150 and offer a conversion kit...just like X-Box 360s wireless conversion kit ($180 Australian!).

At least being Open Source chumby has given us the choice...

I wonder what percentage of users upgraded to a video i [things peas come in] when it came out (it's the P-word - kind of like "He who must not be named...")...

Very intriguing...are we builiding Chumby's business strategy/product here or are the Chumbians always one step ahead of us?

Re: Power

Angela wrote:

Very intriguing...are we builiding Chumby's business strategy/product here or are the Chumbians always one step ahead of us?

We're certainly not one step ahead of you - we're actually relying on the chumby community in seeing what are overwhelming/common hacks and mods that people really end up using.

We made a conscious decision to have chumby not be portable, based on the actual usage model for the device (e.g., bedside, bathroom, kitchen, sprinkled in various places around the home). But, if the usage model is so overwhelming to be portable, then we might consider it. As bunnie said, though, it opens up a lot of doors when dealing with recharging circuitry and rechargable batteries.

Joe

Re: Power

why not make chumby modular, and have a separate board for portability? make some kind of dock connector for easy attachment.

need upload space for the forums or a chumby blog? right here then
http://www.nophus.com/useru
username is chumby
password is chumby

Re: Power

ChumbyDoctor wrote:

Here's an idea: make an adapter so a variety of mobile phone batteries can be used to power the Chumby? Never heard of one of them blowing up!

Most mobile phone vendors use Lithium Ion cells now too (but modified to be flat so they fit the phone's form factor) and there are a few using Lithium Polymer batteries (which are even harder to charge than lithium ion and require a better charging circuit, and are even more dangerous as they're more prone to being punctured due to having a soft outer shell). So, just because you haven't heard of them blowing up, I assure you they have. Google "nokia cellphone battery explosion" and you'll see what I mean.

Re: Power

Power storages are only as safe as their energy density to stability ratios allow.
There seems to be a damned shame in physics of storing energy that is defined as-

"Cheap-Safe- Light, Pick any two and the third bites you "

Saphion seems the current Lithium tech to challenge those bugbears. NiMh sadly does not lend itself to
hacker friendly" Pack" charging- but OTC  chargers with cells- for single cells are commonly <$20 for a 4 slot charger and 4 2700 mah AA cells are freely out there. Hack the charger into a Cell holder AND charger by using DPDT reed relays for each cell. AC mains current to charger pulls in relay-Chargy may win es batts- unplug AC or have power fail- relays toggle -batts reconnect into pack keeping Chumby fed. Yes, it's old school klutzy but cheap&dirty often bats last.

Oren

Re: Power

If I used a rechargeable 9volt battery, would it get charged do you think? That would seem an easy solution. Granted, it adds a whole hour, but its better than nothing.

Re: Power

Ya know - you could just use a couple of large caps and one of those self charging flashlight thingamabob's... just give it a shake every now and then and Chumby's happy for a little longer.  You could even make a circuit to display (as a widget) how long the battery life expectancy is...

Bruce