YBox2 – a networked set-top box

Technology

ybox2_20080611.jpg

The original YBox was a nifty little electronic gewgaw that made it easy to make a network appliance that displayed itself on a TV, all fit into an Altoids tin. The kits have been sold out for quite a while, but I’m excited to hear that it’s been given a second life in the YBox2 platform.

Robert Quattlebaum undertook the task of creating the new version and teamed up with ladyada to help bring the new kits to the hacker masses. It’s built around an 80MHz 32KB Propeller chip, supports NTSC and PAL, and comes prepackaged with a bootloader that allows you to upload new firmware over ethernet instead of requiring you to use a programmer cable.

This is an open hardware project, so you can either build it from scratch or purchase a kit from the adafruit store. All you’ll need to do after that is write a cool widget for it and send an email my way so I can post it here. :)

YBox2 – DIY Networked Set-top Box

0 thoughts on “YBox2 – a networked set-top box

  1. wintermute says:

    Great, but it isn’t yet compatible with Firefox3. Bummer.

  2. sam says:

    It’s a good idea but I hate the fact that I pay good money for advertisements on top sites and more and more browsers/plugins keep coming out that stops people from seeing them.

    Internet advertising is a doomed market

  3. Matt Katz says:

    Hi – I’m one of the developers on Add-Art, and we are a bit stumped about how to get it to work on ff3. We really really want to get it working, but we are having trouble as the ff3 guys essentially identified the image swapping that we do to get the art in as a security issue. So they “fixed” it.

    Supposedly there is still a way to do it as an xbl binding, but we’re having a tough time hacking it in. We’d sure appreciate it if you could call out to your readers about this – we could use some help. We’re open source, and it’s easy to get started with us over at http://dev.eyebeam.org/projects/add-art
    Thanks!

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