I'd love to see someone come up with a way of replacing the board with a pi zero or something equally small form factor so that the touch display, jog wheel and buttons could all be used natively running a custom Linux distro or something like that. I like the form factor and I feel like it would make an AWESOME home assistant or smart home addition for light switches where the jog wheel could be used for dimming or even just as a media controller for each room of your house to controll whole house audio.

Yesss make a diy car thing

Wil it run doom?

@@Jonas-km4qx Nope! Unless you count hooking it up to another device and serving as a glorified monitor.

If the Pi Zero W can be turned into a Car Thing then why can't the Car Thing be turned into a better Car Thing? Is it possible to root it and have it connect to a 3rd party Spotify player as well? I'm going to root mine shortly before it's bricked and start messing around with it. Hopefully by then, we'll have a viable solution to keep using it after Spotify drops official support. It's really nice to have in older vehicles like my truck from 2009 that is lucky to even have an aux port.

3rd-party products are a bit different; they're not maintained by Spotify and no one would blame Spotify if those products suddenly stop working properly. It doesn't hurt Spotify's brand image if they decide to change certain APIs and those 3rd-party players don't keep up with the changes, whereas a decent portion of people using a Spotify-branded device would be upset at Spotify if that device suddenly stopped working properly due to some API change. Either way, if Spotify decided to allow those devices to keep working forever, they'd eventually have to deal with either maintenance costs or the backlash from people whose devices stopped working. The only other possibility is if Spotify just decided to never introduce breaking changes to their API going forward, but I can't imagine they'd make that commitment for obvious reasons. P.S. I say "API" loosely here; the API is whatever the Car Thing calls out to to get all of its data, not necessarily the Spotify Web API. In this case, I think it's the Spotify phone app.

They would have to mantain it, and its another suite of tests that everything has to pass before being deployed

@@nwalkewicz @rawallon sorry, I should clarify! I was thinking if it would be possible for us to take our now defunct Spotify Car Things and hack them to just use a different interface to still be able to communicate to Spotify though not directly supported or maintained by Spotify.

@@bukimari this is exactly what i want. i use my car thing in my car since its so old it doesn't even have an aux jack. its nice to be able to change songs or playlists without digging my phone out of my pocket and i just want to be able to use it the way i have been for the last 3 years. i really hope some one out there figures out a solution for this before they brick them

in the tech scene apple is known for supporting old stuff then outside the tech scene apple is known for planned obsolecence

A very good point indeed.

Hey, some people are installing custom ROMs on R1s. The hardware isn't all that bad once you aren't locked into the proprietary software.

​​@@nikytamayo that's the 1% of the 1% id rather just use an old android phone than an R1 just put some Velcro on the back or a pin and put it on your shirt and boom 50$ rabbit r1

People already figured out how to run android 13 on a rabbit and it looks like it ran well and one got the phone working

@@kyle207 That's because the Rabbit was running Android all along, and the "R1 operating system" was really just an Android app. All anyone's done is swap out the existing AOSP Android OS for amore full featured Android OS. Not downplaying that, just saying it's very different from hacking the Car Thing. Especially because, thanks to a 2.4 GHz processor, 4 GBs of RAM, and 128 GBs of storage, the Rabbit is waaaaaaaaay more powerful than the Car Thing.

$10, take it or leave it. The pi zero 2w is 15

@@danielpicassomunoz2752 not with a screen and knob

I went on ebay the day of the announcement and some were still on sale for over 100 dollars. Unreal.

@@danielpicassomunoz2752 Still need a screen on top of that tho, will drive up costs fast

i just checked ebay and theyre going for 60-70 used which is wild

Using it as a companion to something else is likely the most viable option, yes. It doesn't have the power or versatility to be a standalone something, because it wasn't designed to be a standalone something. That said, given it has to be plugged into something anyway (it has no battery!) may as well use USB for data transfer before digging into the difficulty that is Bluetooth communication. Not to mention you'd probably need to build a custom app for that purpose too. There are options! It's just that none are "super easy, barely an inconvenience."

@@anoraker well I’d be hoping to continue using it in the car. I drive a soft top Jeep so having an old cd head deck and this thing for visual control is better than putting some new Android headunit in there and finding my top slashed open next time I park somewhere quiet.

@@danielkonigs2769 I agree, there's a lot of potential use for this. It'd be great to stick in the back of my car and let my son control music.

​@@anoraker the design and intended purpose rarely matters in the world of DIY tech.

​@@anorakerto be fair, the thing is most akin to a remote control, so a lot of the coverage of its limitations has been complaints like "Why can't I make this stereo remote work as phone!?" and not "let's see if we can make this remote work for other TVs/stereos? " Spotify's decision is a dick move for sure, but the hardware itself is getting a bit of skewed coverage

I was considering into getting one but the thing that kept me away is that it doesn't have an FM transmitter. I could then play music on my old radio. Now I just use a 12v quick charger with a bluetooth/usb/SD card capable FM transmitter. It had such potential but they blew it.

But the issue is that you would still need a smartphone with you to use it, and at that point you can just use your smartphone

Dual monitor. One for spotify, one for GPS.

I agree. Though, I think they might have been manipulated to not support older cars. I think they do know that we want this device, and yet they chose to go against their own customers. The corporations really start to look like the ones in Cyberpunk, actively supporting their "friends", and completely ignoring us. Is there any petition to not brick this device? I pay for Spotify since 2020, use it frequently in a car (older type) and never even heard of this device. I need to use a transmitter which is annoying to say the least. What a shame...

Very American comment

There are folks trying, at least. I've gotten to know the people in the Car Thing Hax Community, and if they don't succeed in turning the Car Thing into something new, it won't be a lack of effort.

Where is that community ? Do you refer to a discord?

@@JosueRodriguez08 Hello! Yes, there's a discord with a pretty vibrant community and growing fast. You'll find it here: discord.gg/ZGURgxtaGM

I wonder if alpine linux could be loaded onto it. The generic arm-v8a iso is ~220 mb, but the raspberry pi images are around 60mb. The kernel could be stripped further, as it's way too much for just a screen and a turn dial; plus, a nice feature of alpine is that the everything can be stored in ram. The file transfer could happen via bluetooth, so not really a need for wifi, although it would be nice... If Debian can be installed on it, I personally believe anything is possible for the little thing.

Yeah no crap. We were doing much more on far worse specs in the early 00s. The problem is all the modern programming practices have made even the most simple tasks take huge amounts of resources. Combine this with all the popular projects being written in interpreted languages or bastard attempts to write desktop apps with web code (eg electron) and you get this situation where a 1.8ghz cpu and 512 mb of memory can run an audio control macro pad. for a This thing just needs an embedded lightweight version or Linux or one of the real time OSes out there. Then someone with with knowledge in C or C++ to perhaps write a driver or two and the front end GUI.

Agreed, idk what OP's expectation was... To run crysis?

I guess those raspberries he says can run full blown os

Have I understood it correctly that it's basically just a Bluetooth remote with a display, a button and a wheel? The most challenging would be to get the artwork, and playlist... don't know if there's a standard protocol for that. Play/Payse and skip buttons should be available through ordinary HID protocol.

That sounds awesome. You should check out the Car Thing Hax community, they've already done a bunch of legwork that might help you out: discord.gg/ZGURgxtaGM

That's essentially what it is, yes. It runs OpenLinux and pulls up a Webapp, then the Spotify App on your phone sends it all data through Bluetooth. It has no wifi, no speakers, no output.

@@anoraker hmmm... well of course, if putting together an RTOS, first step would be to drive the display and read the inputs, but if Linux kernel sources are available as you say, that shouldn't be the most difficult thing to implement. Android has that "now playing" feature where you can control media apps, from notification area, that support it, that one shows cover-art and title. But I don't know if it's trivial to tap into that, and I don't know if it expose the playlist, my phone doesn't show it if it does... I have no experience writing software for smartphones. Just that feature in itself would be cool to be able to export to the thing, it would work with multiple media apps and it wouldn't require an internet connection if you're just playing local content.

This should be much more feasible. IMHO, anyone attempting to run Electron or adjacent software on this is barking up the wrong tree. It might be fine for modern devices, but not the greatest fit for something so low powered.

For sure! After all, microcontrollers already runs tons of HID devices without the need of lots of speeds and storage size, surely someone must be capable of putting some sort of RTOS that can handle the display and touchscreen to work as an hid device

It doesn’t use electron??

At the same time, it wont feel as high quality than the Car Thing tho. It will always feel self made, and the Car thing has a sleek design. Other than that, yea

B-but wheres the 400% profit margin for the CEOs?

​@@kintustisit retailed at 90, but was consistently sold for less than that. Given the prices OP listed, you'd come pretty close to what most people paid for theirs doing it DIY, before counting your time/labor

Spotify doesn't use Electron, it's using CEF to render UI, the desktop app is built in fucking C++

yea, that can do a lotta stuff, i dont think its a "kids these days" type of problem tho, i just think he's taking the normal non-tech savvy perspective where the only things to do with are possibly gaming and some multimedia, which can be indeed a limited experience compared to... like ANY used smartphone from the past 8 years. my faith is that someone puts together a normie-focused UI for clementine or some other open music program with good integration so that it can still serve its purpose somewhat in (normal) people's cars and so on, maybe even add some GPS or smth. (no not inside clementine, i mean a basic client to access any map, could be web app idk). anyway, yea, for us the minority of geeks that can even be used as embedded single purpose stuff, i can see that wheel thingy as something SO USEFUL for remote control of some parameter, from fan speeds on a warehouse or a greenhouse, to thermostat and engine/motor controls for industrial application, anyway, i'm just yapping like a "kid", being one. edit: added quotations on "kid" because im not really a child ofc, im a "kid these days" being a zoomet.

True. On the embedded stuff I normally use in my projects, 16k memory is a luxury, with some mcus running at way below 1 mhz, so 1.9ghz and 512mb RAM is crazy, not even mentioning 4GB(!!!!) of storage! Always depends on your viewpoint. When coming from the server world, a 64 core gaming pc seems tiny, when coming from pcs, a 4 core arm soc seems miniscule, but when coming from embedded, even a c64's hardware is MASSIVE!

yeah, it's a powerhouse for such a small device, hell, even an entire desktop linux + qt ui thing could easily fit in that

Me too! Sounds like an awesome DIY project. Definitely would build one for my older car

Yeah, just wanted to say, wtf, 512mb ram is underpowered?

hardware power vs developer time costs. That’s why old terminals at airports respond to key presses in a few ms while modern PC solutions that do the same thing with a web app that takes tens of seconds. “progress”

1. The car thing does not use much of its power to play back music 2. What you described could literally be done on a punch hole computer. It's barely above the computational power of an exceptional human.

@@BigLeek-ig3sb 1. so why make it so powerfull when you don't need it? so yes the car thing need all his power because the software they use is not optimized, which is my point. 2. Not literally because a punch hole computer will not fit behind a bar (trust me I used one when I was in school, they a huge) and yes I was also lazy and I did use an operating system, I did not rewrite a file system nor the drivers for the touch screen and the serial link. But today, to do the SAME thing, they use embeded windows or androi, so they need a least 100 time more powerfull hardware...

@@frederichardy8844 what are you even yapping about? The car thing is extremely weak and slow. Do you think decoding and playing back audio streams and using LTE can be done without any performance at all? 🤣

Ofc

"if it has a screen, it can run doom."

Honestly, if you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty, you could unlock the device and install a lightweight distro (distribution, a variant) of Linux or maybe in the near future, install a specifically made one for Car Thing and get Spotify on it to continue using it as before. And even use something else if you want. Follow the evolution and I'm sure a great alternative to throwing it into the trash will pop up. Because despite him saying in the video that 512 MB of RAM is low, trust me: for Linux, it's plenty enough to run a fully-featured lightweight distro you would normally install on your PC. The only potential issue is the storage of only 4 GB. That's still feasible though by having a stripped down version, removing all the useless code for this particular device, just like Spotify did actually.

@rigierish3807 totally! ive been looking in to it for a little bit and i might try doing something similar soon!

4 GB of storage is a bit of a problem (and eMMC is kindof slowish storage). And my understanding is on some units (but not all?) that's partitioned into smaller segments. Unfortunately, 2 GBs of RAM is often the minimum requirement these days (Windows 11 IOT, Android, etc.), but there are a few options like the more stripped down Linux varieties like OpenLinux (which the Car Thing runs) or PocketMarket OS. Again, I'm not saying impossible. Just difficult. The most likely use case scenarios emulate what the Car Thing currently does... offload all the work to a companion device.

I mean plain Linux kernel will boot with about 16MB of RAM and if you ditch the shitty JavaScript based stuff and just write actual native applications that chip can do a lot of stuff.

@@anoraker emmc isnt that slow lots of cheap android devices still use cheap versions of emmc and i can play minecraft 1.15 on the 512mb ipad so it isnt that tiny of a memory

@@anoraker emmc is fine, and embedded linux is fine for a media player.

@@zoele_ Absolutely. My entire point is it's not strong enough hardware for anything more than that. Which makes sense, because that's what Spotify built.

That's the part I don't understand. You look at that Github and you almost can't tell it came from Spotify. The "company name" is a small hint, but also one of the contributors has Spotify as part of their user name. I'm not sure, but to use the various assets they used, I think they have to post all this stuff publicly legally? But maybe at the time while they wanted to satisfy that requirement, they weren't looking to foster a hacking scene.

@@anorakerthey don’t have to post it publicly, just make it available on request without any unreasonable demands e.g they could have you pay $5 to ship you a flash drive with the source on it

@@anoraker they definitely legally had to post it somewhere to adhere to the open source licenses. As you mentioned the Spotify username on one of the people was a giveaway; but I didn’t notice the company name anywhere. Out of curiosity: how did you stumble on this? A really good Google search? I definitely don’t think they were looking to foster a hacker community. But I think they missed a lot of free good will points by not pointing people this way

I've been basically reading almost every commit from the Spotify people because I'm weirdly fascinated. I found the answer to my own question though: the maintainers file mention Spotify very clearly. also it answered my question: what is superbird? and it's the codename

You’re simultaneously missing my point while stating my point. The Car Thing does little more than display a blank web page. Then the Spotify app on your phone sends all the data to fill that page. The music plays from your phone, and then it sends all the rest of the data such as the title, artist, album art etc. without your phone it does nothing and can do nothing. And as such Spotify built it with just strong enough specs to … display a blank webpage. And nothing more. Which is fine! Until Spotify disables the app integration and breaks it. And my greater point is, all the calls that say “if Spotify would just stop refusing to open source this we could turn it into some powerful device!” Are wrong because it’s already open source and it can never be a powerful device. But you could turn it into something like what it already is… a webpage device that displays data and little more. But you’ll need another device to do all the other work. It will need to communicate over Bluetooth or USB, and it will need to communicate small data… titles, song names, album art. That’s doable. But not easy peasy. There’s a community working hard on this. And I hope they succeed. But again all the “if it was just open source it could be hacked and repurposed already” aren’t accurate. Because it’s been open source all along, and it’s still not easily repurposed. Yet.

😂😂😂 It's a me. Mario. And I'ma comin' to get you.

I know at least one person pulled this off, but I don't think they posted how they did it.

There are a bunch of people who'd love that. Using this as a Macro Deck is probably one of the top use cases people are after.

I have an unused one you can have if you want, I’ll even pay shipping.

Update: I got my hands on one of it and will start to develop the client soon. :)

Basically, the Car Thing does nothing on its own. All the music, artwork, etc. comes from the Spotify app. Spotify designed the Bluetooth protocol to be dependent on the app, so even when you play music from other sources, it's still going through the Spotify app. So while the company hasn't said how it will brick the device exactly, the most likely scenario is updating the app to disable to protocols the Car Thing is dependent on. Without it, the Car Thing isn't a useless thing. Removing the check for premium doesn't change the rest of that. It'll need a whole new set of firmware to keep it going.

@@anoraker Thank you so much for explaining! I really hope someone is able to make an alternate...OS/firmware or whatever its called to just keep some semblance of this functionality. I'm no programmer but if they've open sourced the code that Spotify uses to make this work with spotify could it be used as a.....Plug-in/or something else with a program like VLC or maybe have it act as a airPlay target or something. Again I clearly don't know what I'm talking about but I'm just hoping someone can utilize this for an analogous current use. I don't need it to be a command center or stream deck. But, I literally bought it from someone a little while ago and love it.

Thank you so much! Hearing that helps me keep going!

Found the Louis Rossmann viewer! XD his video was brilliant.

@@anoraker Yes, got the idea from his video. 😂

I agree!

.... that's what I ultimately said?

As I said elsewhere, Time marches on. You can go back far and say, "but look at what we used to do on that hardware in the 90s, 80s, 60s," etc. But that hardware often did just the one thing and nothing more with tailor made programming and software for that purpose. Now browsers and other software are made to take advantage of modern hardware with new features and capabilities, and since it's fair to assume you have more than a gig of RAM to spare (what with modern machines having many times that much), it's no concern if that software wouldn't perform on less powerful hardware that just isn't that common anymore.

Do you want to know the real crazy kicker? The very first prototype Spotify sent out to a few people had an Aux port, 4G connectivity, and ran Android. No phone needed at all. I'm working on getting a hold of one so I can make a video about it.

​@@anorakerI would have loved if car thing had an aux out.

You should definitely check out the Car Thing Hax discord! You'll find it here: discord.gg/ZGURgxtaGM

I guess that this custom android version is bazed on android 4 or around that time?

@@Daniel_VolumeDown 4.4 is bazed yes. it's probably the most useful and most low resources you can go with android.

Exactly. If they marketed it as a desk toy and included things like keyboard mounts and allowed it to connect to a PC instead of just a pho e it would have been a hit.

The whole thing is pretty awful, yeah. There's some progress in converting Car Things into Some Thing Else over at the Car Thing Hax discord.

Working on creating one! Video coming soon.

Great! I am curious what can be done!

It’s not one stat but all of them put together that make it weak. But for comparison’s sake, even the iPhone 5 had more RAM and storage, and the Car Things processor is only about twice as powerful as the iPhone 5’s… a device released in 2012. Again, this is all “fine” for its intended purpose. But makes getting this to do much more than its intended purpose a difficult prospect as OS systems have moved on. Even now one difficultly is that the Car Thing’s built in Chromium browser is very out of date.

@@anoraker Im sorry, I wasn't aiming that comment at you. I'm more upset at how bad the software must be that's available to run on it in a sideload fashion. 64MB should be enough for an entire desktop OS in my opinion

It's almost as if it's not 20 years ago and now software is far more powerful and therefore requires modern hardware with more power.

Heck I do a ton with just a 1GB ram VPS, debian Linux takes 80MB of RAM on fresh install. 4GB is a ton.

@@Grahamaan27 The 4GB is 'secondary storage' (ie: flash storage in this case). It 'only' has 512mb ram... but that is still quite a lot 🙂 4gb... I run a FreeBSD based VPS with that much ram, which does a lot of stuff, including handling fairly high quantities of mail with spam filtering, a whole bunch of 'web apps' with their databases and backends, etc. Yeah, you really can run a lot of stuff with that amount of ram. Just don't try to run a modern browser, or modern 'full sized' desktop environment.

It’s very tight inside. No room to spare. I’ve only seen a couple of attempts to disassemble and both ended up breaking the screen.