Super Chumby

The Chumby One, produced by Chumby Industries, is a great little radio with a great many features. Extensive alarm functions, many music sources, and customizable widget feeds leave any need satisfied.

Almost.

To make up for the almost, I decided to try to fix the biggest gripe about the Chumby One so far, the terrible wifi reception. The chumby forums have countless threads complaining of the wimpy wifi adapter. Without a large pocketbook and intermediate linux skills to use a better wifi adapter, I had to improvise.

In addition I fixed my second biggest gripe, the battery life. The sub-amp hour battery that fits in the compartment allows for maybe an hour of battery life with music. Not good for the portable radio to carry around the house that i had hoped. So onto the hacking.

These modifications should get you an extra bar of connection on average and around 6 hours of battery life with internal speaker for about $40.

*Image of wifi adapter courtesy of iFixit

Step 1 Materials

Here is the break down for the Super Chumby

-Chumby  Industries
Chumby One- $79.95 (on sale)

-Digikey.com
2.1mm Power Jack CP-5-ND - $2.11
2.1mm Power Plug SC1052-ND - $3.44
RF Cable Assembly JF1R6-CR3-4I-ND $4.50
(2) U.L Receptacle H9161-ND - $2.88

-All-battery.com
Li-Ion 18650 3.7V 6600 mAh Rechargeable Battery module with PCB - $21.99

-Amazon.com
9dbi Wifi antenna - $6.99
(Any size/dbi rating would work, I just know this helped get a signal in my garage.)


All together the Super Chumby was the same as the Chumby One's normal price.

Tools/Supplies I used include:
Soldering Iron with fine solder - Preferably a point tip.
Wire Strippers
Panavice -Not mandatory, just really helps.
Tweezers
Flux Pen -Again not mandatory, just really help with SMD soldering.
Assorted heatshrink
Sticky-back Velcro
Hand drill and drill bits. -5/16 and 1/4 if you use the same parts
Small Screwdriver - I really lucked out on this one. It just reaches the main chassis screws.

Comments

[Computothought]

The Insignia Infocast at Best Buy is a Chumby. I bought the eight inch one for 67 dollars on sale. The 3.5 inch was 40 dollars on sale. They have since jacked up the price to almost full retail. I like the eight inch one but have not really tested the antenna for distance. There is a sight that has a bootable image to let you run a web browser on the Chumby. Be interesting to see whether it works on the 3.5 inch. I have a server and wanted to use it to interface with a home automation server.