This page is a collection of mini-tutorials on doing stuff with the Chumby Hacker Board (for brevity we will refer to it as the CHB)! The CHB is a cool single board Linux computer that has much of the same hardware as the famous Chumby One. It's great for people who are experienced with Linux and want to have the power of a microcomputer with audio and video output while at the same time getting all the peripherals of a microcontroller such as analog-to-digital conversion, PWM outputs, sensors, bit twiddling, and broken-out GPIOs!

While we believe that the CHB is a fairly easy-to-use Single Board Computer (SBC) having a pre-installed OS on the included uSD card, and ready drivers for the peripherals, its not designed for beginners! The board is best used by those with previous Linux experience: the good news is you don't have to have another Linux computer to set up the CHB but you should have familiarity with shells and shell scripting, gcc, make, dmesg, etc. We also suggest having had some poking around with microcontrollers such as BASIC Stamp, Arduino, AVR, PIC, 8051, etc. So that when we say "i2c" and "not 5v tolerant I/Os" you can follow along.

The CHB is not in any way officially supported by Chumby Industries! Chumby has generously offered a Forum and Wiki where they will try to share information but there is absolutely no tech support or guarantee that the CHB will meet your project needs. Please do not contact Chumby directly either by email or phone for help with your CHB. If you have questions, please post to their forums to receive help from others and the occasional assistance from a CHB developer.

Want to pick one up? We have Chumby Hacker Boards and accessories in stock at the adafruit shop!

Hardware Specs

  • Freescale iMX.233 processor running at 454 MHz
  • 64 MB onboard RAM
  • Comes with 512 MB uSD card with 100 MB Linux installation all ready to go
  • 3.3V I/O pins can talk to most sensors, motor drivers, etc. No struggling with 1.8V levels.
  • Low power, fanless ARM926 core draws only 200-300 mA
  • Onboard GL850G USB hub draws 100-200mA
  • Built-in Lithium Ion/Polymer battery charger and 5V boost converter for portable projects
  • Three USB port jacks!
  • 1.5W mono 4-16 ohm speaker amplifier (0.1" JST onboard connector)
  • Microphone input (0.05" JST onboard connector)
  • LCD controller with 2mm output port
  • 3.5mm A/V output jack with stereo audio and NTSC/PAL composite video
  • Back of board has GPIO outputs on 0.1" header spacing, plug in an Arduino proto shield (Beta version only, Final boards don't have this)
  • Quadrature encoder connections onboard
  • 5-way joystick on-board
  • MMA7455 3-axis +-2G to +-8G accelerometer on-board
  • 3.3V TTL serial port for easy shell access
  • Full GCC toolchain is ready for you to download and get crackin'!

Mini Tutorials

More info may be found at the official Chumby Hacker Board Wiki

Pictures!

Click for large photos of the v1.0 PCBs
Click for large photos of the beta PCBs

This guide was first published on Dec 12, 2012. It was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Oct 23, 2012.

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