A very alpha version of a web based interface to control your Chumby device can be gotten at the link below.
What you will find inside are a set of cgi files you will need to place in the /psp/cgi-bin/ directory and then chmod a+x them. You sould then be able to start using it by pointing any web browser, on the same network, to http://ip.of.the.device/cgi-bin/custom/index.cgi
For those who do not like sshing into your device I am making a wrapper that allows you to install these files by copying the files on a usb stick, inserting the usb stick in the device and rebooting…easy peasy.
(nb. I started working on these things and then found Chumbymote (http://wecreategames.com/blog/?p=181). They had already worked out the screen capture stuff, the general layout and some of the functionality. I took it, cleaned up the code some and started adding/reworking things. Much thanks to their efforts as it got the dev rolling nicely)
So what is already working?
(keep in mind I am making the pages such that they will not look like pewp on the tiny screens of a smartphone… dynamically brilliant one size fits all page layouts are going to happen when I lock down the bulk of the functionality)
Main functions – Screen brightness/on/off, sleep mode control, speaker volume, move thru the widgets and seeing a screen capture of the current widget currently running on the device(auto refreshed)
Streaming – Select from 9 presets, stop, start and volume
FMRado – Select from presets, scan up/down freqs, stop, start and volume
Admin – Reboot, reload the widgets, see disk usage.
What is in current development–
Podcatching/listening– I have chumbized Bashpodder so you can either have podcasts archived on a usb stick or stream them to the device without storing them. Right now I have it working such that a list of the most current podcasts from each source are listed on the screen, you select one and it starts streaming to your device. The whole things works off a simple text file of podcast sources you supply and which I am making a web interface to edit/manage. I am toying with grabbing a Google Reader/Listener opml file but as that will muck with authing and the like I think that will be a way way future feature.
Admin– Adding ore system stats and hooks to control the device
Streaming & FMRadio – An easy way to enter your own stream urls and FM freqs. I am also looking into using chumbradiod to get finer control of the fm radio
Main – Installing, deleting and managing widgets. With the closing of Chumby.com the folks who rely on widgets for everything are going to have a bumpy ride. My hope is there will be places to host widgets that do not require chumby.com to run, many already exists. Seeing as all of this is controlled by ascii in the file system control should be obtainable via a web page.
Some thoughts– So having spent a day or two working on all this I have one thing I need to say…if you have enabled shell on your device please for the love of bob CHANGE THE PASSWORD from the default. Also remember there is a "default" account. Nuff said.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel free to post em on up. If you are good with dynamic page layout please feel free to rip me appart on the layout and show me how to do it better…it has been many a year since I did this for pay or for fun..so have at it.
