Static Radio For The Chumby One

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If you haven’t heard of Static Radio, it’s basically an online radio station made up of podcast content. [Brendan Fitzpatrick] decided to take an old 2009 Chumby One and turn it into an appliance for tuning in to Static.This was achieved by creating a native C Static Radio client that could run on the Chumby’s 454 MHz ARM9 CPU. It’s got no FPU, only 60 MB of RAM, and runs Linux 2.6.28, so it’s not exactly the most up to date platform out there. But nevertheless, [Brendan] was able to make it work.The client starts from a USB stick, without touching the original firmware on the Chumby itself. [Brendan] bundled in mbedTLS, since the stock Chumby OS shipped with OpenSSL 0.9.7 from 2004, which simply doesn’t cut it today. He also threw in a fixed-point Helix MP3 decoder along with HE-AAC and a polyphase resampler to handle sound, with the audio stream piped out to the kernel’s ALSA PCM device. The client is set up to buffer not only the current station, but the two neighbouring stations on the dial as well, so that turning the knob to switch stations comes with a clean crossfade transition.If you’ve got a Chumby sitting around doing nothing, this could be the perfect way to put it back to work. We’ve examined other hacks for this venerable piece of hardware, too.