We thought we’d follow through on our open source repair guide announcement by taking apart some open source hardware. We got our hands on a Chumby One and put it under the knife!
Chumby industries has thrown down a gauntlet to other hardware manufacturers by giving hardware hackers a tremendous amount of freedom, and by making the Chumby One quite easy to take apart.
What’s impressive is that they managed to provide unprecedented freedom AND deliver a nicely designed and executed product.
Check out the video slideshow of the teardown!
Teardown highlights:
- Notable components found inside the Chumby One include:
- Freescale i.MX233 CPU, running at 454 MHz
- MMA7455 3-axis accelerometer
- Hynix 923E 64MB DDR DRAM
- QN8005B FM Radio chip
- An inscription that reads “with love, bunnie”
- The MicroSD socket contains a 2GB Kingston MicroSD firmware card, which can easily be pulled out once the device is opened. Users can load custom firmware and upgrade Chumby One’s storage in a snap.
- There are plenty of ventilation holes in the top and rear outer cases. Such a Swiss cheese case design allows the Chumby to stay cool without the need for a fan.
- Volume control commands are sent via a rotary encoder that translates angular degrees of rotation into binary code recognized by the board.
- The wireless card is attached to a small interconnect board, converting the four-pin connector found on the logic board into the USB connector used by the wireless card. This could potentially mean hacking/upgrading the Chumby to 802.11n in the future, were you able to find a USB Wi-Fi card of similar size.
- You can also unplug the USB Wi-Fi card and plug in regular ethernet using a USB-to-ethernet dongle.
- The 2W mono speaker is mounted onto a resonance box which occupies precious interior space, which could be used to stuff more awesome hacking stuff into the Chumby. Alternatively, it could be used as a secret stash for narcotics.
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