Tuesday, September 6, 2011

More Chumby Hacks (Insignia Infocast)

I used Ultra Voice Changer, an Android app, to record some audio and alter it using the built-in robot filter preset. The alien presets are pretty cool too. Alternatively, you could use a text to speech website from AT&T Labs to generate some nice vocals for your Chumby. I plan to use these .wav files to indicate startup, shutdown, and a few other status changes. I saved mine in mono at 11 kHz to save on space. I then transferred my audio files by usb stick to the Chumby and placed them in a directory I made at /mnt/storage/sounds/ From there it's simply a matter of calling
aplay /mnt/storage/sounds/robotmode.wav
to call up our .wav files. If you prefer .mp3 format, use btplay instead.

Saturday, September 3, 2011

Chumby Hacks (Insignia Infocast)

First off, I could not ssh into my device from Putty or any other remote terminal as described in the Chumby Tricks wiki. So, I attached a USB keyboard to the Infocast, which automatically puts it in terminal mode. Then, I typed:
mount -o remount,rw /
putting the root filesystem into read,write mode.
Next, type:
passwd root
to create a root password. Enter it twice as prompted, then you should be able to ssh in remotely.
Unplug your keyboard and ssh into it from a remote computer!

Successfully connected? You should see the chumby logo in ASCII art.

Next, we'll have the sshd server always start upon bootup.
From your remote terminal app of choice, type:
touch /psp/start_sshd
That's all there is to it!


Following the directions at adafruit, I next installed the falconwing gcc toolchain. So far, so good!

Using directions from this page, install python! Here's how to install it: 

cd /mnt/storage 
wget http://files.chumby.com/languages/python/python2.6-­chumby.tgz 
tar -­xzf python2.6-­chumby.tgz 
python --­­help 

Great! Now I have all the programming environments necessary for more robotic tinkering in the near future.

Adventures in ChumbyLand!

Hello again! Been a long time since my last blog post, but I have been busy!
     This summer, I finally got around to hacking my Insignia Infocast 3.5", now discontinued :-( which I picked up after Christmas for $49. I made a lot of tweeks and hacks to it, to make it the brains of my next robot. Unfortunately, I went a little too far editing the boot sequence and bricked it! Being a dummy, I didn't back up the sdcard rom before messing with the device. But after much searching, I found the OEM rom image and a control panel update to my relief. BTW, a standard Chumby Industries falconwing nor a Adafruit Chumby Hacker Board rom image will work on the Infocast 3.5".
     So now I have it back up again, to factory original! This time I backed up the rom image, update.tgz, and will document all the hacks I do, in case I screw things up again!