Living with Chumby in 2024

The Chumby is an odd little device from 2007. It is an embedded internet appliance which was intended to show information at-a-glance, act as an alarm clock, and stream music from internet radio stations.

The key difference that made Chumby different though was to trust the user. It is an open book with a web server running on the device allowing you to put custom CGI scripts on it, free reign to root level SSH access on the embedded Linux firmware, two USB ports on the back, and the ability to sideload custom widgets for the system made in Flash.

While a company with one of the original Chumby employees offers a replacement service for the now-shutdown original Chumby widget service, I feel that it isn’t worth the 3$ a month that it is offered for.

It’s not a great value when any widget that requires internet connection (basically all of them other than clocks) are probably not going to work and there are basically no “at-a-glance” information widgets if you live outside of the United States, Canada, and Australia. As someone living in the United Kingdom, these issues led me to make my own widgets.

I made three widgets: a clock, BBC News headlines, and the AuroraWatch UK status. All three of these widgets have been fun to make and nice to have scrolling past on an interval and proves that Chumby’s model of letting the user do what they want with their device holds up now more than ever as 17 years on, I can still get one of these devices, develop my own widgets, and still use it despite Chumby Industries no longer existing.

In 2024, the Chumby is still a very useful device for its original purpose despite the online service shutting down and changing hands before being relaunched even still allowing users to make their own widgets with their own hardware and presents a very compelling why devices should embrace trusting their user and offering right to repair as the first objective instead of being profit motivated.