Adventures with Chumby

From Issue #169
May 2008

May 01, 2008 By Daniel Bartholomew

HOWTOs

Turn the Chumby device into a useful kitchen assistant.

The Secret Chumby Menu—It's as Easy as Pi

There's a secret menu on the Chumby, and it is fairly easy to reach. Here's what you need to do:

Bring up the control panel.
Tap on Settings.
Tap on Chumby Info.
On the info screen, in the upper-right corner is a tiny Pi symbol, tap it.
Done!

If you followed the above steps, you now are looking at a screen titled “Do you believe in the Users?”. Tron references aside, now you can do things like browse the filesystem and start up the SSH dæmon.

SSH and HTTP on the Chumby

Being based on Linux, the Chumby has a lot of functionality that isn't exposed right off the bat. An example of this is the built-in Web server and the ability to SSH into the Chumby.

The Web server, by default, has only a link to some statistics on how good the wireless connection is, but it can be extended easily.

Yes, you can SSH into the Chumby.

When you SSH into the Chumby, you'll find a nice, embedded command-line environment waiting for you, courtesy of BusyBox. You even can set up cron jobs and run shell scripts.

Daniel Bartholomew lives with his wife and children in North Carolina.

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