A couple months back, Name that Ware featured the Insignia Infocast by Best Buy Exclusive Brands. While it’s marketed as a device for viewing chumby apps and sharing photos, as far as the DIY crowd is concerned, the Infocast is a $169, 800 MHz linux machine with an SVGA touchsreen, 128 MB of DDR2, and a 2GB disk drive.

An example of the versatility of the platform is hb‘s recent port of the Qt UI framework running webkit to the Infocast, pictured running above. For those who want to build it themselves, there are instructions on the chumby wiki and a forum for questions; or you can just download a pre-packaged binary image that you can uncompress to a USB thumb drive, toss it into one of the ports on the back, reboot and use. Note that the implementation assumes a USB keyboard plugged for text input.

Of course, this is just scratching the surface on what you can do with the platform. There are folks working on porting Android and OpenEmbedded, and the hardware reference schematics are available for those inclined to the soldering iron.

chumby is now offering a “hacker” board, which is the guts of the chumby One, but modified to be more hacker-friendly: it comes with three high speed USB host ports, uses the power connector from the Sony PSP (instead of the weird, hard to find connector on the chumby One) and incorporates a variety of headers, such as Arduino-style shield headers and a 44-pin breakout header that gives you access to a lot of digital I/O and some analog inputs. There’s even a four-directional switch on board and some LEDs so you can do quick hacks that don’t require a video display for user feedback. Speaking of the display, while this board doesn’t come standard with an LCD, it does provide composite video output via a 4-wire 1/8″ jack so you can, by using an iPod video cable, plug the chumby hacker board into any TV that supports a composite video input.

(Photo by Adafruit)

The hacker board is currently being sold through Adafruit and also through Sparkfun as part of a limited-run beta program. The board is priced at around $89. The goal of the beta program is to collect feedback from users who purchase the board to fine-tune the design and to figure out what I/Os and accessories make sense to bundle with the board. Like the Arduino, we don’t integrate a lot of features onto the mainboard itself (keeps base cost low). Instead, we’d like to make sure that adequate I/O resources exist for developers to hack in the peripheral module they require to complete their project — or for more enterprising developers to build their own flavor of peripheral board and sell their own accessory.

There’s a few resources available to get people started on using the boards: a forum for general support and questions, and a wiki containing links to datasheets, schematics, and other more permanent documentation that people will find useful. Adafruit also has available a snazzy hackerboard page with tons of info, well-documented tutorials, and nice photos to boot.

One other point of note about the hacker board is that you can install a native gcc toolchain on it, so you don’t need to configure/install a cross-compiler on your host PC to develop for it. Heck, it’s got a 454 MHz CPU and plenty of disk space, so why not? Adafruit has a tutorial on how to install the compiler using a downloadable self-extracting script and a USB dongle. I’ve also heard rumors that an OpenEmbedded port is coming to the board soon, so stay tuned.

If you do end up purchasing a board and participating in the beta, please do contribute to the fora and wikis with your feedback. As always, happy hacking!