Kitchen Chumby

Motivation

I want a Chumby in the kitchen. Its large display shows easily-read recipes, timers, and it plays music. This can be accomplished with current Chumby-type devices, with a number of caveats.

I'm an extremely experienced programmer, but am new to Flash and the Chumby, and my design skills are not so hot. Everyone feel free to edit this page to add your comments, or correct my misunderstandings.

Features

Recipe App

- simple

- text in columns on a page

- page next/previous buttons

- plain text okay, HTML better, images would be nice to have

- each page being a rendered image would be okay

Timer App

- three count-down timers, settable from one minute to eight hours

Issues

Application State

Timers are problematic. If there are multiple Flash apps in a channel, each plays for up to 15 minutes, then resets. No app that I know of saves its state, thus timers are not very useful. If a single app has recipe features *and* tracks timers, that would work. But, that means a single app would have to handle everything. My ugly Recipe app wouldn't play nicely with your pretty Timer app.

Compatability

The BestBuy Insignia Insight 8" is seemingly perfect for this application. It has a nice 8", 800x600 resistive display. Some features were left out of this device that the pure-bred Chumby has: multiple alarms being the most problematic for the kitchen.

Solutions

traditional Chumby app or apps

This forum post points to several Flash apps useful for the kitchen: http://forum.chumby.com/viewtopic.php?id=5261

web app or apps

This would be ugly, but extremely flexible

combination of web, Flash, and local services

For instance, a browser could control a local CGI script, which communicates to a command-line Pandora client.