11–20 of 42 posts
Bunnie is also responsible in no minor way for both Chumby[1], and the Novena[2] open laptop. Met him briefly at Maker Faire and I made sure to thank him for all his excellent work. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby [2]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena
Non-affiliate link to the pre-order for Bunnie's new book: https://amzn.com/dp/159327758X OP is ~450 word announcment summarizing each half of the new book - if you're interested (hardware manufactring and hacking), you'll already know it and can skip the ads.
Bunnie is also responsible in no minor way for both Chumby[1], and the Novena[2] open laptop. Met him briefly at Maker Faire and I made sure to thank him for all his excellent work. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby [2]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena
I really loved the idea of Chumby. Would have killed it if it had come out more recently as an IoT device.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really loved the idea of Chumby. Would have killed it if it had come out more recently as an IoT device.
Not likely. They centered the platform heavily around Flash so that it was difficult to do any development or hacking on it.
Non-affiliate link to the pre-order for Bunnie's new book: https://amzn.com/dp/159327758X OP is ~450 word announcment summarizing each half of the new book - if you're interested (hardware manufactring and hacking), you'll already know it and can skip the ads.
Thank God for that. I was worried Boing Boing might earn five cents when I clicked on that Amazon link.
Amazon Affiliates get credit for purchases for up to 24 hours, including "an aggregate view of what people bought and in what quantities" (as of 5 years ago, but I believe this is still the case).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157107
I personally believe that added value is worth rewarding but this particular blurb didn't add much. @deutronium provided more value by linking to the actual publisher's early-access e-book page elsewhere in the thread, but that wouldn't make Cory/BoingBoing any money.
Either way, I appreciate being made aware of the book's impending existence!
There's a table of contents of the book at: https://www.nostarch.com/hardwarehacker I'm really looking forward to getting my copy :)
In addition to this and the Wired doc, I'd recommend the keyboard.io blog post from October for those who haven't been to Shenzhen yet, but are in the 'deciding' stage: https://shift.newco.co/what-50-buys-you-at-huaqiangbei-the-w...
The amount of thought put into the design and implementation is remarkable and inspiring.
Bunnie is also responsible in no minor way for both Chumby[1], and the Novena[2] open laptop. Met him briefly at Maker Faire and I made sure to thank him for all his excellent work. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby [2]: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena
I really loved the idea of Chumby. Would have killed it if it had come out more recently as an IoT device.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really loved the idea of Chumby. Would have killed it if it had come out more recently as an IoT device.
Not likely. They centered the platform heavily around Flash so that it was difficult to do any development or hacking on it.
The chumby was basically just a small, touchscreen ARM based Linux system, before the raspberry pi made that cool (and super cheap). I've hacked on them quite extensively professionally (I was a chumby employee) and personally in Flash/haxe/C/Python and even golang, and lots of others outside the company did as well.
One of my favorite bits of work at chumby was helping NPR Labs (their director at the time, Rich Rarey, was a chumby fan) with this project:
http://www.npr.org/sections/npr-extra/2013/05/28/177751307/b...
The prototype for this was the bigger 8" chumby (the Best Buy branded one at the time), hooked to a braille reader. I wrote drivers for the braille reader and an ActionScript player extension (I've seen the source code to the Flash player and lived to tell the tale!) so they could interact with it from ActionScript code. You can see a photo of the older chumby-based version here:
https://sites.duke.edu/nab2012/2012/05/03/npr-demonstrates-t...
However, I'm also pretty skeptical that chumby re-imagined (without a serious shift in how it was targeted) would be successful if released today. The chumby (basically an Internet-connected alarm clock and radio and by the way, some random apps) made a lot of sense prior to the iPhone/Android revolution in smartphones, but not so much after that.
If you haven't had the chance to read one of Bunnie's hardware teardowns, you're missing out. His teardown of the Form 2 3D printer ( https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4641 ) is a great example of his work.