The Chumby One
Chumby One shown from the Top Front
In December of 2009 I bought a Chumby One from chumby.com. My main reason for purchasing it was so that I could have an easy way to play my music collection from my home server. I’ve been using my Sansa e230 or my wifes Sansa e130 connected to my home stereo via headphone jack to stereo RCA. This works but it means I have to put the music on the player and fiddle with the limited playlist abilities.
The Chumby has a headphone out and a touch screen. I have a DVD player that can play mp3 cd/dvd but I don’t want to have to turn my TV on in order to listen to music so that is why the Chumby caught my eye. Especially since the Chumby One had an intro price of $99 which was about the cheapest thing I could find that would do what I wanted and not require a Windows box.
My other plan would have been to buy a beagleboard and try to put something together myself or possible shell out a lot more cash to pick up a Touchbook from Always Innovating.
Chumby One Back and Bottom View. The back has heat vents, one USB port, one headphone jack, and a 5V power plug. Bottom has access to the battery (optional) compartment and the FM radio wire antenna.
I contacted chumby.com through their chat before purchasing and I found their chat support to be very helpful. The person suggested to me that I could use a the Squeezebox server and use the Chumbys music function to connect to the squeezebox server. He also told me that he had his Chumby connected to his receiver at home and that it sounded good. ( My other problem with the Sansa players that I was using was that the headphone jack doesn’t really provide line level output so I have to crank up the reveiver and have the player volume maxed out in order to get decent volume to listen to.)
I wasn’t too sure about this but I thought I would try out the Squeezebox server and see what it had to offer. So I set that up on my home CentOS server and then after some searching I found Squeezeslave which I installed on my eeebuntu netbook. This seemed to work pretty well so I thought I would go for the Chumby and see.
That’s all the time I have for right now. More on the Chumby One later.
