Programming the Chumby

Students at the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena have been deploying chumbys as probes in people’s homes. Their goal is to collect outcomes and reactions that family members have after spending a week with the devices. Family members are not allowed to change the information displayed on the screen, but are expected to have it on throughout the day. I helped the students develop some custom code for widgets which were deployed onto the device. Here are some of my thoughts and critiques:

When it boils down to embedding technology in our everyday life I think there is still much more work to be done. Chumby is on the right path, but it is, essentially, yet another screen. Over the past year I’ve put a lot of thought on ambient devices, calm technology and ways to bring information from the virtual to the physical without being abrupt. One project I worked on, ubi.ach, was an exploration in that direction – a physical object that reacted to digital content. The doll was wireless and received alerts from a bluetooth enabled computer.

Above: a later prototype called Ubiidu – still a work in progress

We realized how objects of this sort really do have a powerful impression on people, especially when they feel like they can relate to it in some way or form – in the doll’s case, through its querky character. The chumby peeps are trying to create a community of hackers/developers around their product, which is fantastic. But I’m not sure what non-programmer users will like about this device, which is why I’m so interested to see the results of this research.
I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to setup the chumby and deploy applications from the web onto the device (unlike its counterpart, the Nabaztag, which gave me lots of problems as I was trying to setup its wireless features). The chumby is intuitive, but what I like best is that most of the setup is done online, through the personal web account. A user sets up a unique channel, which can be applied to his or her chumby. When a user wants to change the content, it can easily be done online when logging into the user’s account.

The students were interested in developing a webcam client widget which would be able to receive streaming video from Justin.tv. The forum and wiki have a good amount of information for beginner developers. Working on the webcam widget, we got to a point where the flash file was working fine online but did not work when we set it up on the device itself. Talking to the chumby customer support we concluded that it was most probably a codec issue – that flash lite (on the device) is not as robust and does not accept as many codecs as the regular flash. Nevertheless, I was really impressed with their customer service and fast support. Loved the online IM tech support so much better than navigating through horrible IVRs on the phone. It just made so much more sense. Since we couldn’t get the webcam app. working, and our time ran out, I went on to develop a widget that displays worldwide earthquake information to the student’s request:

Chumby displaying earthquake data in my kitchen

Two small complaints that I do have – the screen heats up… quite badly. And the touchscreen was a pain – it almost always took several tries to push a button on the screen. I really wished the device was wireless, and that there were ways to dim the screen or partially turn it off and save energy that way. I also followed this discussion on ownership and rights to widgets once uploaded to their site. All in all, I hope to get a chance to keep playing with it. I have some ideas which I think could be fun, even if it is yet another screen in the house…