Brendan Fitzpatrick built a native C client that turns a 2009 Chumby One into a dedicated Static Radio appliance, streaming podcast content through a device with a 454 MHz ARM9 CPU, no FPU, and 60 MB of RAM running Linux 2.6.28.
The client boots from a USB stick and leaves the original firmware untouched. Fitzpatrick replaced the stock OpenSSL 0.9.7 from 2004 with mbedTLS, integrated a fixed-point Helix MP3 decoder, HE-AAC support, and a polyphase resampler, routing audio to the kernel ALSA PCM device. The knob-tuning experience is not bolted on: the client pre-buffers the current station plus its two dial neighbors simultaneously, producing a clean crossfade on every channel switch.
The full project is on GitHub at madewith-bestpractice/static-chumby. Read the original for the specific constraints Fitzpatrick worked around to get modern HTTPS streams playing on decade-old SSL libraries and a CPU that cannot handle floating-point math.
[READ ORIGINAL →]