A chumby-powered device for $49!

A reader has pointed out to me that Best Buy dropped the price of their 3.5″ Infocast to $49. That’s a crazy good holiday-season-only deal for an open-source, 454 MHz wifi-connected touchscreen linux computer!

15 Responses to “A chumby-powered device for $49!”

  1. kentkb says:

    Yep!
    Also just bought the Best Buy Insignia 8″ for $99.
    Though I am having a problem, every time I start it, I am asked to “Activate” it which I did the first time.
    I will not let me “Activate” it again and so it will not work.
    Help

  2. This is quite a deal! I bought three of the 3.5″ machines: One to use, one for a friend, and one to hack!

  3. Best Buy just jacked up the prices to $100 and $170 for 3.5″ and 8″ Insignia Infocast devices. I missed the opportunity.

  4. Scott L says:

    It’s not too late. The website currently shows both units on sale as stated. I was hoping this would happen, looks like I will be picking up an 8″ unit myself.

    http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1&_dynSessConf=8411901251285132541&id=pcat17071&type=page&st=infocast&sc=Global&cp=1&nrp=15&sp=&qp=&list=n&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960

  5. Madox says:

    It seems the sale goes back to $49.99 every weekend ;)

    Its only 99.99 on weekdays!

    Waiting for a friend of mine to send it over so I can put it on this thing :-
    http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5206

  6. RO says:

    The last 2 days, Dec 26-27, the 8-inch was 67.99, so I grabbed one. Now it is back up to 99.99. I am thinking this pricing behavior and the fact that they are “not available for shipping” online now indicate these are being phased out by BB.

    This is also the case with the Sony Dash – not available for shipping, and frequent sales, although the discounts are not so steep (Sony restrictions?).

    Is BB giving up on this product category? It seems they are not effectively educating consumers via marketing/infomercials as to the potential here (but then I hardly ever watch TV, so could well have missed complete marketing campaigns…).

  7. J Foote says:

    Chumby Infocasts are now out of stock at all Bay Area Best Buy stores (and everywhere else as far as I could tell despite misleading BB store search results).

    If these products are *not* being phased out please tell us, otherwise I won’t waste my time hacking them.

  8. pegr says:

    Well, the BB prices seem to change everyday, so keep checking. What was out of stock a few weeks ago is now back on the shelves. Right now, the 3.5″ is $69, and the 8″ is $100. That’s more than it was before xmas, but $100 for a 2GB linux computer, with every media port short of Firewire, and an 8″ 800×600 touchscreen? Fantastic!

  9. WB6BNQ says:

    Just for your information, in the USA, when a case is dismissed without being tried and a jury verdict returned, the “DOUBLE JEOPARDY” statement does not apply.

    The prosecutor may well be smarter then you seem to want to give him credit for. Perhaps he realized that he was on shaky new ground fraught with problems and decided to not risk creating an adverse action at that time.

    It is far smarter for the DA to dismiss very early if he realizes his case is too weak. SO, the defendant is able to be retried subject to any statute of limitations that may apply. There is no “double Jeopardy” application in this case.

    SORRY !

  10. Gordon says:

    Bunnie,

    Any idea what the temperature range of these boards?

    Gordon

  11. Thanks for the inspiration! My wife picked one up for me as a XMas gift for $39. I’ve been tinkering with it for weeks. It’s currently serving as a wifi ethernet shield on steroids for one of my Arduino Clones. Set your FTDI board for 3.3v serial, plug it into the USB port and bam! it’s *almost plug and play. Almost…. I had to mod the built in webserver, load Python, load Pyserial and run the simplemessaging library on the Arduino.

    If anyone knows of a device that has more hardware & capability for $40 let me know! My only regret is not buying 10 more for my friends.

  12. I’ve gone ahead and bookmarked http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1468 at Digg.com so my friends can see it too. I simply used A chumby-powered device for $49! bunnie's blog as the entry title in my Digg.com bookmark, as I figured if it is good enough for you to title your blog post that way, then you probably would like to see it bookmarked the same way.

  13. I do tons of number gathering for these types of games because I feel that history will usually give us an insight of what can happen in the future. I’m sure you know that more often than not its hard to decipher the winning team in professional football. This is why I consider using statistics for basketball.