SO! A few years ago, Spotify sold this cute little device called a Car Thing. Well! They’re gonna brick it in January. So now hacker community members have located an obfuscated but public repo that basically let them in on flash and rewriting the firmware on the device, thus avoiding having a nice doorstop.
Whew!
That brings me to DeskThing, which is a v protoypey implementation of replacing and adding to the functionality of the Car Thing, minus being locked to Spotify. You can still use the device with Spotify, just now you might also be able to use it for Apple Music or your own home media. It’s a lovely little doohickey so any excuse to rotate the nob and play with the buttons is a good one in my book.
I mean look at it:
~Sexy~
I’ve been lurking around in the DeskThing Discord for a minute now, and it’s absolute chaos. Mostly, people not knowing ADB from Electron, but definitely a plethora of problems nonetheless. This was thrown together fairly quickly by a single college student, with some help from the broader hacker community in the Thing Labs Discord.
As of right now I have had to:
- track down how to configure udev
- track down how ADB perms work in concert w/ udev, and how that’s different on my Arch desktop vs a Raspberry pi
- figure out how electron-build platform targeting works
- find out that despite everything, my rpi3b is Not gonna run a hodge podge electron app, LOL
And after a lot of that, I have the system going on my own Car Thing:
Like I said before it’s sexy; the tactile feel of the controls is very dialed-in. The wheel has distinct bumps, and a button in the center for selection. There are several hotkey buttons on top, which are now used for swapping between apps.
There are apps! So on top of Spotify proper, you can use a clock, a Discord notifier, and a sexier Spotify developed by a youtuber who is ground zero for this thing breaking into the popular sphere.
It’s so pretty I almost impulse purchased a 3D printer. I really didn’t need one, though there’s a sale and this one printer can do 4 colors at once and has a .2mm nozzle available and…Yeah I almost pulled the trigger there.
Some things I’m looking forward to in the future, as they’ll mark further control and more efficient design options: bluetooth and cfw.
Hopefully, I might be able to help, eventually, get parts of that going. We’ll see.