Static on a Chumby One, featured on Hackaday

Hackaday wrote up one of our projects today: Static Radio For The Chumby One.

The Chumby One came out in 2009: a little internet appliance with a touch screen and a knob on top. We wrote a native client that turns one into a dedicated radio for Static, and the knob is the dial.

What Static is

Static is our radio made of podcasts. It has nine always-on stations, filled with independent shows picked by hand, and every station plays one shared timeline, so everyone tuned in hears the same moment. There's no account and no algorithm. You spin the dial and land on whatever is playing, along with everyone else listening.

Making it fit

The Chumby One has a 454 MHz ARM9 with no floating-point unit, 60 MB of RAM, a 320×240 screen and Linux 2.6.28. To make Static feel at home on it, the client:

• decodes MP3 and HE-AAC itself, in fixed point;
• streams straight from each podcast's publisher over TLS, so every play still counts for the show;
• keeps the stations on either side loaded, so turning the knob crossfades the way the phone app does;
• runs from a USB stick and changes nothing on the chumby until you choose to install it.

It's free, the source is on GitHub under the MIT license, and the README has the install steps: github.com/madewith-bestpractice/static-chumby. A version for the Playdate, where the crank is the dial, is in the works.

Thanks to Hackaday for the write-up, and to everyone who has kept their chumby going all these years.