Hack Turns $170 Photos and Apps Viewer Into a Tablet

If you haven’t heard of the Insignia Infocast, a photos and apps viewer billed as an “internet media display,” it may be time to give this device a second look.

The Infocast has enough hardware chops and an Linux-based operating system to transform it into a kind of a tablet. Some electronics� hackers have tweaked it to run a Webkit-based browser and use the device’s native capability to run apps.� It’s no iPad but the hack is intriguing.

At $170, the Insignia Infocast is cheap enough to experiment with. The device has a 800 MHz processor, 2 GB memory, a 8-inch LCD touch screen, Wi-Fi connectivity and two USB 2.0 ports. The gadget runs Chumby Linux 2.6 operating system.

“While it?s marketed as a device for viewing Chumby apps and sharing photos,” says Bunnie Huang, founder at Chumby on his blog, “as far as the DIY crowd is concerned, the Infocast is a Linux machine.”

Since Apple iPad?s debut in April, the popularity of tablets has surged. Apple sold 2 million iPads in just 60 days of the product?s launch. Other companies such as Samsung and Dell have introduced tablets. Even DIYers now have the option to put together a tablet for $400 using a BeagleBoard kit.

Hacking the Infocast falls somewhere in between buying an off-the-shelf slick product like the iPad and putting together a tablet from a starter kit.

The Infocast already has some of the software pieces that consumers may want in a tablet such as access to limited apps. These apps include online radio services such as Pandora, media content such as NY Times podcast, photos and videos.

But to take the device to the next level, developers have ported a user interface framework that runs Webkit–the browser engine that powers Safari and Chrome among others.

If you want to take a shot at it, there are instructions on the Chumby wiki and more information on Huang’s blog. For text input, though, you will have to use an USB keyboard plugged into the device.

This is just “scratching the surface on what you can do with the platform,” says Huang. Open source hardware enthusiasts are working on plans to port Android OS on the device.

The catch here is that the Infocast doesn’t have a built-in battery so it has to remain tethered to the wall socket. Still, for intrepid DIYers that shouldn’t be much of a roadblock. There must be a hack for that too.

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