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Developing widgets for Chumby with Flash Lite 3

At long last, Chumby is now available in the United States. While it remains to be seen whether Chumby reaches the status of an iPod or a Pet Rock, mobile  developers in North America can use this device as a platform to build Flash Lite applications with unprecedented ease.

Chumby is the first commercial Flash Lite 3 device available in the US, supporting both ActionScript 2.0 and FLV video files encoded with the On2 codec. The Chumby has a blazing 350 MHz processor and a whopping 64 Megs of RAM—allowing developers to build Flash Lite 3 applications without the same pesky performance limitations usually encountered when developing apps for mobile devices.

Flash developers should find Chumby interesting because it runs Flash applications (called widgets). Chumby users can use these widgets to search the Internet, monitor RSS feeds, check eBay auctions, display webcams, watch video and gather information that is normally accessed via a desktop computer. Since Chumby supports Flash and ActionScript 2.0 developers are creating their own widgets to achieve a wide range of personal goals—such as controlling a home media server, adding items to a grocery shopping list, or sending alerts when a message is received on twitter.com.

The Chumby device is unique. If it was simply an "always-on" Internet-connected device with a small color screen, it would be hard to separate it from those digital photo frames that are popular among grandparents. Instead of a hard plastic frame, the outside of a Chumby is soft and squishy, making it irresistibly fun to squeeze its bean bag-like texture. It has a touch screen, too. But best of all, its motion-sensing accelerometer allows you to calculate its current orientation and the amount of agitation being applied to the device.

In this article I'll show you how to begin building Flash widgets for Chumby, by creating a project that connects to Chumby's accelerometer. For the purposes of this article, I'll focus on working with Flash-based widgets that you manually install or distribute publicly through chumby.com.

Specifically, I'll describe the basics of Flash Lite development and highlight some of the new features available in Flash Lite 3. I'll also cover how to work within the security restrictions inherent in hosting your application on another domain. I'll provide some suggestions for optimizing your applications to run on Chumby's processor and show you how to tap into Chumby's built-in accelerometer using ActionScript.

It is important to note that the Chumby device is very open to hacking. The Chumby team has published the motherboard's schematic, and they even provide documentation on how to overwrite the Chumby operating system.  There are many things you can do with a Chumby; you can even create a new leather cover. The topics of customizing a Chumby and hacking the OS are outside the scope of this article, but if you are interested in learning more, I encourage you to search online where you'll find many tutorials and ideas.

Requirements

To make the most of this article, you'll need the following software and files:

Flash CS3 Professional

• Try
• Buy

Sample files:

• flash_widget_chumby.zip (ZIP, 20K)

Prerequisite knowledge

Prior experience developing with Flash is advised, but this article is geared towards anyone interested in an overview of creating Flash widgets for the Chumby device. 

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