Chumby comes to the house

As I wrote in my earlier post about choosing a robot brain, the Chumby One looks like a perfect Linux-based hacking platform for recreational roboticists on a budget. It has a 454MHz ARM processor, a 3.5" touch screen, audio, WiFi, USB, and it can be powered by an optional Li-ion battery. And, most importanty, it's cheap.

So I bought one.

I haven't connected the Chumby to SHORT-E yet, but I've installed and configured a Scratchbox 2 cross-compilation envinroment for the Chumby in Ubuntu 11.04. I used these instructions. In addition I had to install the realpath command using apt-get.

A word of warning: First I tried to install and configure Scratchbox using these instructions  in the Chumby Wiki. They didn't work at all for me. I had my doubts from the very beginning, as the instructions looked far too complicated. I don't recommend them.

 I have successfully compiled and installed several programs I will use in my project. These include fswebcam for capturing images from a webcam connected to the Chumby (I have successfully used a Logitech C-210) and mjpg-streamer for streaming video from the same webcam (see instructions in this Chumbysphere forum thread). I also compiled and installed the eSpeak speech synthesizer - see demo video below.



The face widget used in the video is just an app I found on chumby.com.