Infocast Internet Doohicky
Nov. 28th, 2010 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beige_alertIf you were to visit and look on the table in my living room, you might see my newest toy and wonder if it's one of those stupid "digital picture frames" that I always thought were dumb. How did I end up with one of those?
Well, sure, it does spend a lot of time displaying random photos it grabs from Flickr over the wi-fi, so I guess that makes it picture-frame-ish, and it also displays other stuff obtained from over the network, like weather forecasts and news headlines and such. The real application I have for it is hinted at by the big box next to it, an old USB external hard disk that I had on hand. That holds my music collection in flac format, and the new device is now my digital-to-analog interface for music on the stereo in the living room.
The gadget is an "Insignia Infocast Internet Media Display." Insignia is Best Buy's house brand. I bought it at the after-Thanksgiving sale price of $99. Inside is an 800MHz ARM, 128MB of RAM, 2GB of flash, an 800x600 touchscreen, wi-fi, and Linux. Now lots of devices, especially the ones based around Linux, can be hacked on by the dedicated hackers, but this one, well, it comes out of the box from Best Buy with sshd installed. It's really a Chumby inside. Go to one of the menus, touch the "Infocast" logo in the corner to get the product info page, touch the π in the corner of that, and you get the screen that says at the top "Do you believe in the Users?" and has buttons for handy options such as starting sshd. Ssh in (username root, no password, but, yes, passwd is installed, you'll need to remount the root filesystem read-write to use it though) and you can find the mother of all Easter eggs: Type gcc. It will tell you that the compiler is not installed, but it can download and install it for you. Really. Gcc and make and all the miscellaneous stuff you need to build software. No need to set up a cross-compiler on another computer and try to get every detail of that right. I installed rsync by grabbing the source with wget (already installed), untarred it, ran configure with a --prefix option since the root filesystem is mounted read-only and doesn't have much space so the easiest thing is to put local stuff in /mnt/storage/local, then make and make install. That easy.
When you stop to do the old-person thing and think about how not so long ago an 800MHz ARM and 2GB of storage and an 800x600 display (not to mention wi-fi) would have been pretty darn awesome, and remember the $99 pricetag on this thing, it is pretty amazing. It is intended to contact the mothership server to download the widgets, many of which are configured using a web interface to the management page with a regular computer, but if they do turn that off someday the device won't become a brick, it has, after all, local storage and a real operating system. The USB ports apparently can't provide enough power to run a USB-powered disk drive, so I'm using an old disk with its own power brick that I wasn't using because it's "only" four-hundred-odd gigabytes. The UI for playing music from local storage isn't very good, and the command-line interface is if anything worse, though a bit of shell-scripting helps that. I'll have to mess with GNUMP3d someday. It comes ready to run Pandora, which I hadn't previously used. I've been having some fun playing with that.
Well, sure, it does spend a lot of time displaying random photos it grabs from Flickr over the wi-fi, so I guess that makes it picture-frame-ish, and it also displays other stuff obtained from over the network, like weather forecasts and news headlines and such. The real application I have for it is hinted at by the big box next to it, an old USB external hard disk that I had on hand. That holds my music collection in flac format, and the new device is now my digital-to-analog interface for music on the stereo in the living room.
The gadget is an "Insignia Infocast Internet Media Display." Insignia is Best Buy's house brand. I bought it at the after-Thanksgiving sale price of $99. Inside is an 800MHz ARM, 128MB of RAM, 2GB of flash, an 800x600 touchscreen, wi-fi, and Linux. Now lots of devices, especially the ones based around Linux, can be hacked on by the dedicated hackers, but this one, well, it comes out of the box from Best Buy with sshd installed. It's really a Chumby inside. Go to one of the menus, touch the "Infocast" logo in the corner to get the product info page, touch the π in the corner of that, and you get the screen that says at the top "Do you believe in the Users?" and has buttons for handy options such as starting sshd. Ssh in (username root, no password, but, yes, passwd is installed, you'll need to remount the root filesystem read-write to use it though) and you can find the mother of all Easter eggs: Type gcc. It will tell you that the compiler is not installed, but it can download and install it for you. Really. Gcc and make and all the miscellaneous stuff you need to build software. No need to set up a cross-compiler on another computer and try to get every detail of that right. I installed rsync by grabbing the source with wget (already installed), untarred it, ran configure with a --prefix option since the root filesystem is mounted read-only and doesn't have much space so the easiest thing is to put local stuff in /mnt/storage/local, then make and make install. That easy.
When you stop to do the old-person thing and think about how not so long ago an 800MHz ARM and 2GB of storage and an 800x600 display (not to mention wi-fi) would have been pretty darn awesome, and remember the $99 pricetag on this thing, it is pretty amazing. It is intended to contact the mothership server to download the widgets, many of which are configured using a web interface to the management page with a regular computer, but if they do turn that off someday the device won't become a brick, it has, after all, local storage and a real operating system. The USB ports apparently can't provide enough power to run a USB-powered disk drive, so I'm using an old disk with its own power brick that I wasn't using because it's "only" four-hundred-odd gigabytes. The UI for playing music from local storage isn't very good, and the command-line interface is if anything worse, though a bit of shell-scripting helps that. I'll have to mess with GNUMP3d someday. It comes ready to run Pandora, which I hadn't previously used. I've been having some fun playing with that.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-28 06:41 pm (UTC)Maybe you can get VLC Player running, which ought to solve all your media-player woes?
no subject
Date: 2010-11-29 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-28 06:48 pm (UTC)Are you using its sound chip? How's the audio quality?
no subject
Date: 2010-11-28 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-30 03:31 am (UTC)