Chumby One teardown
Gotta love the team over at iFixit, as soon as a new piece of tech comes out they promptly tear it apart -- in the interest of science, naturally. Be warned though, taking apart your Chumby will void its warranty.
I previewed the new Chumby One last month. It's a widget-based Internet appliance with a 3.5-inch, 320 x 240 touchscreen that rotates between various applications that display audio, video, games, utilities and news. It's a great little device that fits perfectly on a nightstand, kitchen counter or desk.
iFixIt calls the Chumby One a nicely designed and executed product noting that it's quite easy to take apart.
Notable components found inside the Chumby One during teardown:
- 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"
Other highlights:
- 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.
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