I got a couple C.H.I.P. computers during their Kickstarter campaign.  I also got one of their HDMI "DIPs".  I did a few things on these little guys, but never built a project out of them.  They were living in my pile of SBCs, so they needed some love.

My first hurdle with getting these systems back online was that they didn't seem to be connecting to WiFi automatically.  I know this was set up in the past, but they were not connecting.  So, I slapped on the handy HDMI DIP, a keyboard, and a mouse and I used the GUI to get the little guys connected to WiFi.  Now, I use nmap or my router management interface to find them and manage them via SSH.  Easiest is just scanning for SSH using nmap:

nmap -p 22 --open -sV 192.168.1.0/24

When I went to update to the latest release, I discovered  that Next Thing Co. is dead.  This is really unfortunate because I liked their quirky approach to computing.  They made a huge splash with their Kickstarter and the world's first $9 computer, but I guess it's always difficult to maintain a business on such small margins.  Fortunately, a number of community members were resourceful enough to mirror most of the content and to create a community site.  Using the resources here, I was able to get OS updated on these two systems.  The care and feeding guide had most of what I needed, primarily updating the apt sources and the locales.

After all the updates were applied I realized that both of these systems still had their default system names.  So, to honor the fallen, I renamed them "chip_is_dead" and "long_live_chip".  Now, when they are both on the network, I will be able to tell them apart.

I don't expect these systems to run connected to a monitor, so I installed blink.  This allows me to know that the system is up and hopefully responsive after it has been sitting unattended for a while.  For the time being, I'm not sure what project I'm going to use these two systems for.  But, I have them modernized and ready to drop into anything that will run on a 32 bit system.