After doing some cleanup one evening I found my Chumby sitting between my nightstand and my heater. It had been long neglected due to the unstable wireless in my bedroom. I decided it was high time I moved it next to my computer and workspace to assist me in my daily tasks. I found it was exactly what I needed: A pandora player, a facebook/twitter feed reader, a clock, and – well you know how it goes with a chumby.
The one thing I found to be troublesome was the speed of the control panel. While on a call for work I need the ability to quickly mute the volume or dim the lights. On occasion I’d like to see a specific widget without having to push the face of the Chumby with my fat fingers.
After some digging into the Chumby twiki I decided to dust off my Perl skills in order to create an interface to many of the items found here.
The next step made perfect sense to me: Create the PowerShell cmdlets to interface with the .cgi script. This gives me lightning fast access to the functions of my chumby from the comfort of the environment I spend all my time in.
You can download the cgi and module from codeplex.
Here’s a little taste of the things you can do with it:
$chumby = Get-chumby 192.168.1.106 # You can also load this in your profile
#play the PowerShell 2.0 Release Party Podcast
$chumby |Start-ChumbyMusic http://media.libsyn.com/media/powerscripting/PSPodcast-089.mp3
#Mute your chumby - be quiet - there are ninjas afoot!
$chumby |Set-ChumbyMute
#All clear - unmute
$chumby |Set-ChumbyMute -Off
#Set the volume a bit more reasonable so Hal does not wake your neighbors
$chumby |Set-ChumbyVolume 50
#View the next widget in your channel
$chumby |Set-ChumbyWidget -Next
#Switch to the channel you have called News
$chumby |Set-ChumbyChannel News
#Jump to the Twitter widget
$chumby |Set-ChumbyWidget Twitter
#Stop the Powerscripting podcast from playing
$chumby |Stop-ChumbyMusic
#Time for bed - set to night mode and watch it turn into a clock again
$chumby |Set-ChumbyNightMode
#Oh, and finally for the not-so-weak
$chumby |Enable-ChumbySSH
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How can there be no comments on this. This is awesome! Every home needs a Chumby and a geek!
Finally read the article through. That is so awesome. Now, I wish I had gave into my urges of a couple of years ago and bought one.
That rocks! And the module looks very well written, to boot
Lee Holmes [MSFT]
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