chumby One

The chumby One is finally released. You can buy it now for a $99 “chumby insider” pre-order price; once we start shipping, the price will go up to $119.



While I’ve been working on several new hardware platforms for chumby, this is the first of the crop to hit the market. This one made it out before the Christmas season because it is an evolution of the original chumby design, now called the “chumby classic”, as opposed to a completely new form factor for the device.

The key goal of the chumby One platform was cost reduction: my first sketches for the device were drawn on the back of a napkin about a year ago, back when the stock market was in a free-fall and losing several hundred points a day. Unfortunately, the chumby classic hit full-stride launch in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and its cute cuddly form factor comes at a fair bit of a price tag that many couldn’t stomach. So, I did what any entrepreneur would do in a recession, I suppose … scale back, and take a good hard look at everything and try to build a product that is cheaper, faster, and better for the market, to try and win new customers, and to retain the loyalties of our existing customer base.

Fortunately, around that time, a Freescale apps engineer contacted me about a new CPU (the i.MX233) they were going to launch in 2009 that could hit a remarkably low price point. So, I drew up some strawman renderings and did some cost scenarios, and in CES 2009, we circulated the idea around with a few potential customers to get feedback on the features and pricing. The idea sort of slow-rolled through the first few months of 2009, and after chinese new years, I taped out the first prototype board in late March. Around May we contracted an industrial designer to do some sketches, and by June we had a near-final ID; our first 3D printed prototypes were made around then (we couldn’t afford a mechanical engineering contractor I had to learn Solidworks and do the mechanical integration for the 3D prototype myself — since I enjoy learning new things, this was quite a rewarding experience). In July, we inked a PO for steel tooling and by August we had first-shot plastics. September was spent refining and debugging the design, and October was spent doing more testing, refining, and ramping up mass production. And, here we are now, in November. When I wrote this, the first shipment of chumby Ones were somewhere 35,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean en route to LAX. As for the i.MX233, I believe we are one of the first devices on the market to use it…I even got a quote in their launch press release last August, although I couldn’t refer to the chumby One by name at that time.

Just to give you an idea of what the final assembly line for the chumby One looks like, below is a video of a part of the assembly line:


[flashvideo file=http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/images/c1mp_line.flv /]

In addition to being about half the price of the original chumby, the new device added some features: it has an FM radio, and it has support for a rechargeable lithium ion battery (although it’s not included with the device, you have to buy one and install it yourself). There’s also a knob so you can easily/quickly adjust the volume. But I don’t think those are really the significant new features. What really gets me excited about this one is that it’s much more hackable. The most significant improvement is that the firmware is stored on a microSD card.

The microSD card isn’t replaceable from the outside — this is to prevent non-hackers from pulling it out and wondering why the device isn’t booting anymore — but if you take the back panel off (screws this time, no glue seals), it’s fairly easy to access. The key here is that no longer do you have to worry about bricking your chumby device: if you screw up the firmware, you just pull it out, mount it on your dev box, and dd a new image onto it. Also, microSD is a “managed” NAND device, unlike our previous generation device which used a raw NAND device. This means that we don’t have to rely on a MTD layer for the filesystem, and instead we can directly drop ext3 onto the device. While we still mount the root partition as read-only to harden the device against accidental damage, unlike our original cramfs implementation, you can trivially remount it as read/write and modify the linux on the device. Also, our OS image takes up only a small portion of the total device capacity, so there’s actually over a gigabyte of extra space on there for you to load extra applications and libraries.

Significantly, what’s good for the hackers is also good for the developers. Because of this additional flexibility, we could add a ton of great features into the OS. For example, the chumby one supports certain 3G modems, and will serve wifi as an access point through the 3G modem (it can also serve as an access point for an ethernet connection provided via a USB-to-ethernet dongle as well). This is really slick, because that makes it basically a 3G to wifi router; it is enormously useful when I’m traveling and I need to create a wifi hotspot for other devices to use. Of course, this feature isn’t exposed yet at the mainstream user level, but if it turns out to be a popular application it’s something we could wrap a GUI around and make it more friendly to use. There are also other little refinements, such as if you plug a USB keyboard into a chumby One, it will automatically pop up a console shell that you can type into; very handy for times when you can’t ssh in, like when you are debugging network scripts. It also has high-speed USB2.0 support, so unlike our previous generation device, you can plug a USB camera into this one and grab images at a decent speed. And yes, we’ve booted Android on the chumby One. Android runs on linux after all, so why not? Eventually we’ll get these hacks documented on the chumby wiki (heck, maybe even compile them into a book), but right now we’re a little pre-occupied with making sure the product launch goes smoothly. Actually, to give credit where it’s due, most of these cool hacks were implemented by xobs (remember him? he ported quake on the chumby classic), not me — I’m just the hardware guy, xobs is the software guru.

Below are some annotated photos of the chumby One mainboard. Schematics and gerbers are forthcoming, should be up in about a week or two; the GPL source code is already up.

This is actually a pre-production pilot board. The mass production board is basically identical to this, with some minor tweaks to enhance compatibility with the SMT machines we use in China. There’s a couple of noteworthy points about the board. First, the footprints are available on the board for you to populate some parts to break out a composite video signal (NTSC or PAL). We’ve actually wired this up and confirmed that it works, and it’s pretty neat for presentations where you want to plug into a projector and show a crowd of people some widgets. There’s also a pair of test points on the board labeled “SETEC ASTRONOMY” that you can use to bypass the write protect on our authentication ROM, in case you want to wipe out the keys we use to authenticate your chumby. I can’t think of a real reason why you’d want to do that, but I added them on the principle that hardware you own shouldn’t hold secrets from you, so if you don’t like it you can nuke the encrypted access codes we put into each device (of course, it means you no longer have the codes to fetch widgets from our servers, but hey, it’s your hardware, void the warranty and do what you want with it). The security system is actually a bit convoluted on this device, but it uses basically the same, published protocol we employed on the chumby classic with some enhancements to leverage the internal AES engine on the i.MX233 to save the cost of an external cryptoprocessor unit.

One other really cool thing about the motherboard that I’d like to point out is that the power regulators are embedded inside the CPU. And they aren’t just linear regulators, they are switching regulators. And they just aren’t any switching regulators — this switching regulator derives three voltages using just a single inductor. How cool is that? Mad props to the guy who designed that system. The insanely high level of analog integration on this CPU — it pulls in the audio codec, power regulators, speaker amplifier, USB PHY, video DAC, battery charger and more — is one of the key things that has allowed me to create a system that you can buy at an affordable price.

If you’ve seen any of the chumby classic boards, you’ll instantly recognize that there are also mounting holes and features so this board can be retrofitted back into a chumby classic. That’s very intentional, although chumby doesn’t currently have a schedule to put this into a chumby classic; the classic line costs a lot to produce for more reasons than the PCB (think hand-stitched Italian leather). There’s also a couple of technical issues with integration, the most significant being the brutal thermal environment inside the chumby classic: the CPU contains the battery charging circuitry, and unlike the main supply, the charger circuit is a linear regulator so when charging it puts out a lot of heat. This is why we added a heatsink to the CPU, so we could charge the battery at maximum rate without having to throttle the CPU’s activity. I’m not quite sure how I would solve this problem if I were to put the board into a chumby classic, since there are no cooling holes in the device. I also get the sense that there wouldn’t be very much interest in a chumby classic that was a little bit cheaper, but still lacking the much-requested rechargeable battery: I am stuck between a rock and a hard place. However, the initial reactions to the battery in the chumby One are an interesting study in consumer psychology. For some reason, even though the chumby One is smaller and lighter than the chumby classic, and does largely exactly the same things, people don’t feel like it should have a rechargeable battery; they have no intrinsic desire to pick up the chumby One and carry it around. Just goes to show how much form influences a consumer’s perception of function. Also, as a very important note to intrepid hackers who want to try to retrofit one of these boards into their chumby classic: even though the footprint is identical, the chumbilical is absolutely not compatible with the chumby classic. For one thing, the chumby classic gets 12V from the chumbilical, and this device expects 5V. So if you were to just solder on a header and plug it into a chumby classic housing, you would get quite a cloud of smoke out of the device!

Also, as a little game for the readers, I will award a chumby One as a prize to the first person who can most accurately guess the number of vias on the chumby One circuit board based on the photos in this post. It’s a bit like one of those competitions where if you can guess the number of jellybeans in a jar you get the jar of jellybeans. This is vias not counting through-hole pads. Since the gerbers aren’t posted yet, you can’t cheat and use a CAD program to count the number of vias. :-) I’ll end the contest once the gerbers are posted, in about a week or so.

118 Responses to “chumby One”

  1. AndyB says:

    Nice! Very curious about that freescale part – I’d like to guess 350 vias :)

  2. DrElementary says:

    Good info, looks very interesting. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on one…I’ll guess 500 vias!

  3. Travis Deyle says:

    I noticed “Setec Astronomy” written on the lower-left side of the top PCB picture. So apparently the Chumby One is a Russian black-box cryto killer!

    Mad props for the Sneakers reference. How many other Easter eggs do you have hidden in there…?

  4. Jon Smirl says:

    What wifi module did you use? Is it available in the US from a distributor?

    I’d guess 675 vias.

  5. Kelvin says:

    400 vias

  6. Rob says:

    I’ll guess 351 vias.

    -Rob

  7. Mike says:

    Going guess 237 vias…

  8. falldeaf says:

    Haha, wiggly traces.. Are there 289 vias?

  9. Brian says:

    421 vias

    I see an LCD connector on the board. My big hang up with the Chumby is that the screen is too small, is there a larger touch screen that can easily be plugged into this connector? I’m no hacker, so I would like a fairly straight forward solution.

    Thanks,
    Brian

  10. Mat says:

    I’ve placed my preorder as soon as I saw the announcement, being able to see the circuit boards before it even arrives and great, such a change from more mainstream closed hardware.

    I guess the number of vias as 270, perhaps someone in the family will get it as a christmas gift :)

  11. Ralf says:

    Nice board. My guess is 727 vias.

  12. Chris says:

    I’m guessing 600 vias

  13. David says:

    557 jelly^H^H^H^H^H vias.

  14. Rob says:

    My guess is 325 vias :-)

  15. Aris says:

    How do we get one of these for $99 in the UK :-)

  16. tim says:

    What is the packing factor of the vias? I don’t think that method will work here. my guess is 845

  17. Ricx says:

    Well, I reckon there are around 545 vias!

  18. Justblair says:

    I’ll plump a guess at 265 vias

  19. Jim says:

    There are 810 vias (not counting the mezzanine)

  20. Aris says:

    Forgot to guess the vias – i’ll guess at 612

  21. Phil says:

    808 vias. Without a doubt. Clear as day. No way I could be wrong. Like, for sure. ;)

  22. Keith Thompson says:

    Can the MicroSD card be replaced (by the user) with a bigger one?

  23. Sam says:

    I’m shamelessly entering the competition because I fear the USD to GBP conversion will be a disproportionately upward one. 760 vias, and on such a neat device thats quite a lot I think.

  24. Chaz says:

    Looks great! Can’t wait to get my hands on one. I’m going with 393 vias.

    Peace on earth; goodwill toward men? We’re the U.S. Government; we don’t do that. :-)

  25. Aris says:

    Just curious – do you think this device would have enough horsepower to run something like the Linux version of Skype – perhaps even with video via the USB?

    • bunnie says:

      It’s a 454 MHz ARM. So it should have no problem doing VOIP compression, although I’d be curious to see how you do the echo cancellation, because the microphone is in the same housing as the speaker.

      I’d love it if someone ported a VOIP or Skype-like client to the device. It will probably struggle very hard with the video, unless you use a postage-stamp sized video format like QCIF.

      • Aris says:

        Skype handles echo cancellation remarkably well.

        Perhaps a videophone enabled version of the Chumby could be something you would think about in the future – i.e. with a more powerful CPU or some sort of built-in video with a chipset which handles the video compression. QCIF would probably be quite fine for such a small screen like the Chumby has. If not skype then perhaps something a bit more ‘open’ like Linphone http://www.linphone.org/

        I’ve just ordered a Chumby one for delivery to the UK – I can’t wait – I hope they arrive before Christmas – do you think that is likely?

  26. mangel says:

    Pretty good design. Very neat. Good luck with it.

    I wasn’t able to sleep this night and I try counting vias instead of lambs.

    The exact number is 774. :-)

  27. Xobs says:

    Might as well answer a few questions for bunnie!

    It’s an rt73-based USB adapter, but I enabled pretty much every USB wifi driver I could find, so most will work if you want to replace it and have the firmware.

    The on-chip LCD controller is pretty flexible, and should be able to drive most panels with the correct driver changes. An even easier hack would be to use a USB SVGA box, which seemed to work when I tried it.

    The MicroSD card can be replaced. The biggest card I’ve put in one is 16 GB. bunnie is right — just dd off the first 500 megabytes or so from the card in the chumby one and write it to a new card, boot into Special Options mode, and tap “Restore Factory Defaults”. Or delete the 6th partition before you do the dd. It will resize the storage partition to take advantage of the whole disk.

    I’m positive it has enough power for at least the voice portion of Skype, assuming you could get it running. I’m not sure about video, though given the rate at which I’ve seen mplayer run on it even unaccelerated, I think someone clever could get video conferencing going.

  28. Aris says:

    There is an idea for you – a Chumby with a clip-on webcam and a port of Skype or some other VOIP app. Chumby could be the next videophone – and at a killer price point. Regardless of this – I really want one – when will they be available to purchase in the UK?

  29. Oren says:

    380 vias?

  30. Xius says:

    I’d say it’s 466 vias!

  31. Caeanne says:

    I’ll guess at 850 Vias.

  32. Steve Shockley says:

    I’m going to say 888 vias, because that’s just lucky.

  33. Bob Jones says:

    I am going to guess 367 vias.

    Bunnie, if you need any future SolidWorks help, let me know. It is half of what I do and I am always looking for an extra challenge.

  34. ben nguyen says:

    I’m looking for a mini-vga monitor, something that I can use as a 3rd monitor that takes vga input.

    Anyone know if the chumby do this out of the box.. and if not, how hard of hack would this be to do?

  35. Keith Thompson says:

    I’ll guess 495 vias.

    That’s the geometric mean of everyone else’s guesses so far.

    I’m a software geek; I don’t even know what a “via” is.

    [… google … wikipedia …]

    Oh, that’s what it is. Yeah, definitely 495.

  36. Robert says:

    According to the datasheet, the processor supports SPDIF. Is that broken out anywhere on the PCB? If so, that’d make an even more killer network audio player/audio sink. I don’t see it anywhere in the PCB pictures, but hey, I can hope it’s somewhere vaguely easily accessible.

  37. Jon says:

    454 Vias to match the Mhz of the CPU

  38. Mike Grandfield says:

    Very excited to hear about the new capabilities! 516 vias?

  39. ElasticThreads says:

    I’m going to guess 809 vias. looks awesome.

  40. proudfoot says:

    351 vias.

  41. dudusmaximus says:

    444 vias for me.

  42. Mastro Gippo says:

    191 vias. In case of power loss, does it switch to low power mode (display off) if it is powered by battery alone? I would like it to last at least 7hrs (yes, I’m one of those who will use the chumby as an alarm clock too ;))
    I currently have an eee-pc based server, do you think I will be able to replace it with a chumby? (it will just act as a small-load web server, record my favourite radio station streaming with mplayer, and download torrents)

    Good job Bunnie!! :)

    • bunnie says:

      The LCD dims to 50% brightness automatically by default. The purpose of the battery is to give people a chance to use it while walking around the house a bit, so turning the LCD full-off would be counter-productive :)

      As for working as an alarm clock battery backup, there’s a couple of angles to that. First, I think that when the battery gets to a certain threshold, the system automatically goes into a deep-deep sleep mode, but sets an internal alarm to wake back up again shortly before your wake-up alarm is due. The threshold is set to make sure it can run for about 15-30 minutes to sound an alarm that will wake you up. I say I *think* this system is in place because I know we worked on spec’ing it out and I had implemented some of the driver routines for setting wake-up alarms, but I’m not sure if the entire system made it into the first software release; it may be due shortly in an update. Barring this fail-safe, if you have the device in night mode (while you are sleeping) it will actually last substantially longer than an hour on battery, and some high percentage (like 95% or so) of the blackouts in North America are shorter than half an hour long, so typically you’re covered. If you do live in an area with routine 7-hour blackouts, however, I’d still recommend against using this as an alarm clock in those areas.

      However, you can hack the system to adjust the power policies. We don’t reveal this at the user level but there are knobs you can turn to do things like reduce the CPU frequency, shut down the USB subsystem (which draws the lion’s share of the current in low power modes), and so forth, and you can *really* stretch the battery life if you do that.

      • Mastro Gippo says:

        Thank you very much for your reply. Actually, I was not really worried about power grid blackouts, but sometimes during storms our house main contactor goes off and we have to go outside to restore it, that’s why I can experience long blackouts in my house. It usually happens less than 10 times a year, but I need to be covered.

        Well, I was already thinking about a little usb dongle with a PIC, a backup battery and a buzzer that will wake me up at the right time if the chumby loses power, as I’m not that good in linux hacking.. I’m happy to know that you already implemented a solution! :)

  43. GregF says:

    Thanks for writing about the developement of Ch1.
    I find it fascinating to read what’s involved in the development of products. I think you are dead on regarding reaction to the form factors.
    I prefer the classic, but ordered a One to fiddle with making a case.
    Couldn’t make myself take the stuffins out of the little guy.

  44. MikeS says:

    555 vias. This thing looks great and I’m loving the microSD card idea (makes living without the second USB port a bit more palatable). Can’t wait to expand my collection. Nice work!

  45. roby says:

    585 vias

  46. OsvaL says:

    Hi Bunnie, just an advice. I’m from Paraguay and I have a physical address in the USA where everything I buy, I send there and the courier company send me back to my country. I would like a lot to have the new Chumby One but the Chumby Store only accepts credit cards from the USA. I use to buy things from Amazon without any problem using my local credit card without any inconvenience. The problem with Amazon is that they don’t have the new Chumby, only some used Classic Chumby. I don’t know if you can do it, but it will be great if the Chumby Store could accept International Credit cards.

    Best regards!

    • bunnie says:

      Sorry about the inconvenience–actually, the best place to leave a comment like this is with customer service at chumby.com. I’m just a tech guy banging away on a personal blog :-] I do know they collect these comments and these feed into our strategy meetings, so getting a note in with them does make a difference.

      That being said, I am guessing there will be chumby Ones on eBay soon to service the markets chumby currently can’t ship to due to territorial distribution agreements or trade barriers that we don’t have the time or money to work through.

      • OsvaL says:

        Thanks for the reply Bunnie!! I will try to figure it out how to do to have one!! I will have one!! BTW, I was “reading” your thesis, you are a really genius!

  47. Pierre says:

    Already ordered one, but I’ll offer it to my father if there are around 256 vias on the Chumby One

  48. Steven Tighe says:

    I will guess-timate 367 vias. Go Chumby!

  49. Theo says:

    I’ll guess 306, including buried vias (if any).

    iMX233 direct boot from SDIO is a neat trick… commodity parts are definitely the way to go.

  50. […] Chumby One is a cheaper Chumby that … The Chumby One is a cheaper Chumby that does more. I even prefer the design of it to the original. One […]

  51. Adam B says:

    262 Vias.

  52. Niubi says:

    Whoah, that’s a really nice piece of equipment there, and the price tag looks sweet too. Anyone know when DubLi will start stocking it?

  53. Jon Wilson says:

    374 vias and I have no idea what a via is… but I want one of these.

  54. Bo Jensen says:

    Wonderful article! Very thorough. I’mma gonna guess 554 vias.

  55. Abigail says:

    sweet! I guess 414 vias.

  56. Stephan says:

    No clue either what vias are… but I’ll guess 460. Did I win??!

  57. Mike says:

    I was wondering if there is a hack that might allow the user to plug their Chumby into their PC and use the device as an external display. If this were possible it’d be sweet considering that the screen is touch sensitive.

    Anyways, i pre-ordered myself a Chumby One and i’m very excited to get mine in. Can’t wait to see what future iterations of the hardware you guys will come up with, and if they’re all around the same price point i would definitely pick those up too.

    Major props for making this device so hackable.

  58. Mike says:

    Oh and i guess 523 vias.

  59. Shane says:

    I guess 521!

  60. William says:

    316 vias! Neat post.

  61. Nick Aubert says:

    I guess 638 vias.

    This looks like a lot of fun. Too bad about losing the squishy form factor. It’s very cool but hard to justify, kind of like wobbly windows in Compiz.

  62. Stripes says:

    Nifty little beastie! It would make a cool little unit for an RV. (displaying batt level, fresh/grey/black levels, and I wish I could figure out how to measure the propane level…it would be nice to know if I’m on no charge, trickle charge from the tow unit, or 10AMP/30AMP/50AMP power…)

    Or it could be used in the tow vehicle. Hook up two USB cameras (one on the back of the tow vehicle, one on the TT) and switch to the appropriate ones, or split screen them. (Tow vechicle view is good for lining up the hitch, TT view is good for reversing, or keeping an eye on traffic — split view is good for reversing to make sure you don’t back into anything OR jackknife!).

    471 VIAs for the newcomer!

  63. […] and very interesting info on how the open sourced hardware Chumby is made… Filed under: open source hardware — by adafruit, posted November 19, 2009 at 1:25 […]

  64. 1337 Vias says:

    See my name.

  65. musekmkr says:

    676 vias and a free chumby please, thanks.

  66. trialex says:

    I’d like to try 247 vias please!

    Nice work on the new price.

  67. al says:

    put me down for 198 vias… go low or stay home, I guess ;o)

  68. Steve Shockley says:

    The rules don’t mention it, but I assume I’d be disqualified if I wrote a script to submit every number from 1 to 2000 as a guess…

    • bunnie says:

      Yes, I should clarify: I will only take your very last guess in consideration, if you submit multiple guesses. And you’d probably bring down the site. :-P It’s just running on a tiny shared server without a ton of bandwidth.

  69. Nathan Myers says:

    463 holes.

    Want!

  70. bala says:

    This is cool.. thanks for sharing all the design. I am guessing 634 vias!

  71. J. Peterson says:

    Bunnie – Very cool design! Just curious why you used external EEProms for the ID codes when the CPU has a “DRM Unique ID” and “OTP AES Key” on board?

    [Oh, and since I’m posting, might as well toss in a # of vias guess: 236]

    • bunnie says:

      The OTP AES key is necessary but insufficient to implement our cryptosystem. The ID code EEPROMs are divided into two banks, authenticated, and unauthenticated. The authenticated ID stores a bank of private keys, which have less function in this implementation since they are trivially readable but provides cross-compatibility with our more secure implementations that use an explicit hardware coprocessor that can keep the RSA keys secret. The unauthenticated ID stores stuff that’s just handy to know but not strictly required to be secure, like skinning codes.

      Also, the authenticated ID codes are not at all writeable without shorting out the SETEC ASTRONOMY points (requires physical access to PCB), whereas the unauthenticated ID codes may be reflashed in the field.

      In other words, I simply needed more bits, and I wanted some bits to be read-only, but still some others to be read/write, to provide flexibility in our device management policies. SEEPROMs are fortunately very cheap for what they do.

  72. N. Bass says:

    432 vais. This is a reall interesting project, and one that an awful lot of interesting people are excited about

  73. Jesse says:

    Put me in for 666 vias. 555 was already taken :( Go Slipknot!

  74. Adam says:

    Ding…just bought one.

    I looked at the Chumba last yearish and dismissed it for not having all the features you added in the Chumba 1.

    Nicely done.

    oh and 937 fizgibbits

  75. James says:

    Having a guess: 598 vias

    I’m aol’ing the previous question about UK availability?

  76. alszik says:

    Thinking 222 vias. It’s obvious :)

  77. Roadmonkey says:

    I’ll take 555 vias for $99, please Alex.

  78. Roadmonkey says:

    Oops. 555 was taken.

    Must 543 vias.

  79. Rikard says:

    Theres 914 vias.

  80. […] of the Chumby Filed under: Hardware, Linux — 0ddn1x @ 2009-11-20 21:58:12 +0000 http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=611 Leave a Comment TrackBack […]

  81. genepi says:

    42 is the answers to the Ultimate Question about Vias, Life, Universe and Everything!

  82. Feroze says:

    I preordered mine as soon as I got the email announcement. Cant wait to get my hands on it.

    As for the Vias, I would guess 5 vias per square inch (just a guess) which would put it at 125 vias give or take.

  83. Bramz says:

    One question: does it has an SPDIF out pin somewhere on the board? Found this one through boing boing, and I definitely want one … but I need digital audio out …

    238 pins.

  84. rev says:

    If the USD to EURO rate is not going to be absurd I’ll get one.
    Or I’d be happy if it has 237 vias ;)

  85. Ann says:

    Couldn’t tell if there were any buried or blind vias but will guess 433. Hope Santa delivers a bunch!

  86. Sittisak says:

    This is a very cool design and the price is very cheap!!!

    My guess for the vias are 555.

  87. Clever_Screen_Name says:

    I’m guessing 781 vias.

    What’s a via?

  88. Ge0rG says:

    I’d say 210.

    P.S: Are you going to attend this year’s Chaos Communication Congress (and bring along some Chumbys?) :-)

    • bunnie says:

      I very much want to go to CCC this year — it has been too long since I have seen many of my friends there — but unfortunately I just can’t afford the trip out to Berlin this year. :-( Hopefully, next year!

  89. JamBlob says:

    Can’t wait to get my hands on one of these.

    I reckon 220 vias.

  90. cellphone says:

    I’m guessing 777 vias, since that’s a good luck number. Hope I win it! :)

  91. follower says:

    Assuming the edges vias are counted my find is 729 vias.

    As I counted there’s ~630 non-edge vias and ~100 edge vias.

    You can check out my working here, feel free to recount and disagree (blah, blah open source, many eyes etc :) ) (my numbers on the image are a little different because some of the dark blue spots aren’t edge vias but I missed them when I was finding non-edge vias):

    Flattened: http://stuff.rancidbacon.com/misc/chumby/chumby_one_layered_flat.jpg
    Gimp layers: http://stuff.rancidbacon.com/misc/chumby/chumby_one_layered.xcf

    –Philip;

  92. humptybump says:

    the use as an access point using a USB Ethernet dongle sounds intriguing. It could be very handy for the exact case you describe. I often end up in places with just an Ethernet connection and would love a wifi option. I did not see anything in the wiki yet so I’ll keep my eyes open for tips ! thanks.

  93. Raketemensch says:

    I’ll go with 749 vias.

    Awesome little device. I saw another site today that sells just the guts, but they’re $40 more than an assembled unit!

  94. follower says:

    In case you missed it, the winner was announced here: http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=685

    –Philip;

  95. David baer says:

    Think about this.
    If you really did find a working formula that made you, say $1,000 a week online on average and it kept producing income no matter what, would you want to sell that idea to a bunch of noobs for $47 a pop and expect to retire on the proceeds? No way, man! It does not compute. It does not add up. And it does not make any sense to do that. I certainly don’t go shouting from the rooftops how I make my money online. Hell, I don’t want the competition taking a slice of my pie and neither would anyone who really does make good cash online.

    http://www.onlineuniversalwork.com

  96. Philip H says:

    Hi Bunnie

    I’m gpoing to receive my Chumby One tomorrow, and am looking forward to it immensely!

    I really like your idea about attaching a 3G modem to my Chumby to turn it into a wireless access point, and think it would be great if you could make this a standard feature of the firmware (as it will save me the hassle ;-)

    Cheers,
    Philip H

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    may friend had a china made battery charger and it overheated after a week:.,

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