So I got my Chumby a couple of days ago and its very solid so far. The chumby arrived promptly within a couple of days of ordering it – in a nicely packaged canvas bag with no molded plastic packaging or wire ties to cut through.
As far as setup goes, it was very straightforward. It connected to my wireless network first time, and after configuring some flash widgets to play using my account on the chumby website I was up and running. The chumby started to cycle
through the set of selected widgets (in my case – current weather for my zipcode, blog rss feeds (particularly good for blog
comments feeds), google news, stock quotes, flickr, utube most popular etc). As far as the widgets go, the user experience is different to browsing the web. Your fed small digestible chunks of the web at a time and after a couple of days of usage its quite addictive.
With the basics over with (and as the chumby runs an embedded Linux 2.6 kernel) the next step was to see if I could
connect to the chumby. Thanks to the linux librarian, I discovered it was
possible to ssh. I just needed to enable sshd using the “pi” icon in the chumby options panel. After folowing
href="http://wiki.chumby.com/mediawiki/index.php/Chumby_tricks">these steps
, I fired up putty, entered the default
password of “root” and I had a shell to the chumby. Very cool!
The Linux librarian also mentioned streaming audio from a SlimServer so I figured I’d give that a try also. This took a bit
of fiddling around but I eventually got it working.
Here’s the steps to get basic mp3 streaming to the chumby using SlimServer (and things that screwed me up):
1) Install SlimServer 6.5 from here
2) Start the slimserver. It will listen on http://localhost:9000 and you can connect to this url using a web browser to bring up the slimserver admin interface. When you first connect you can give it the location of your music folder and it will find all the music on your computer
3) ssh to the chumby. Start the ‘btPlay’ mp3 streaming utility to connect back to your slimserver.
>btPlay http://:9000/stream.mp3
4) In the slimserver admin configure the content you want to stream to the chumby client. I made the mistake of adding a file with a .m4a extension first. After some time I resorted to running the slimserver with debug output on the command line and the mistake was obvious enough .. not obvious without doing that. Switching to an mp3 and voila! I had mp3 audio streaming working. The Chumby is not a squeezebox but the sound is fine for background listening.
5) Next step was to try and get radio streaming working. I figured I’d have a stab at getting AlienBBC working. I installed the AlienBBC install pack and tried to stream the Chris Moyles show .. silence…(followed by some swearing ….more silence …)* and back to the slimserver debug output ..
>slim --d_source --d_plugins -d_remotestream
6) After much pissing about (including an upgrade to SqueezeCenter7.0 which I unfortunately could not get to work), I discovered I needed to:
- Build and install lame.exe into the “\server\Bin\MSWin32-x86-multi-thread” directory
- Modify \server\Plugins\Alien\RTSP.pm as follows:
# Check client - only stream to known slim clients
#if (!defined($client) || !$client->isPlayer()) {
# $::d_remotestream && msg "Alien only streams to Slim players\n";
# return undef;
#}
Finally .. success!