HOW TO – Mod a VGA screen into a Chumby

Technology
HOW TO – Mod a VGA screen into a Chumby

Vga Mod Finished Sm
Bunnie writes-

For hackers, the fun part of consumer electronics is taking things apart and making them do things they weren’t originally meant to do. Since most consumer electronics devices are closed source, it’s a laborious process to do a hack; first you must reverse engineer the platform, and you are often relying on gut and instinct to grope around at the edges of your knowledge about the platform. Thus, on most platforms, it’s a challenge to reskin or case-mod the device, and deducing the location of a debug port and opening a console shell on the device is a big deal.

Chumby is different; it is open source, and designed to be hacked. For example, the serial port is spelled out on the silkscreen for you and there’s a backdoor to enable sshd, so it’s not big deal to bring up the console. Because of its hackability, you are enabled to do significant modifications due to the availability of all levels of design documentation—hardware, drivers, and application software. While it would be an enormous task to, for example, open up a Zune and put a larger screen on it, here, in this post, I will show you how to hack a chumby to have a larger, higher-resolution screen without too much effort. The native chumby screen is a 3.5” QVGA (320×240) display, but after you complete this hack, you will be treated to a 5.7” VGA (640×480) display.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged

current: @adafruit - previous: MAKE, popular science, hackaday, engadget, fallon, braincraft ... howtoons, 2600...

View more articles by Phillip Torrone

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK