How Spotify Car Thing Turned into an Open Source E-waste Nightmare
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- You may have heard the news that Spotify will brick its first hardware device, Car Thing. And you probably saw reports that Spotify refuses to open source the device so people can hack it and keep it going. But that's not true!
Today we'll get into the details of the Spotify Car Thing, its open source status, and the chances of modding it into something useful.
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Spotify posted source code here:
github.com/sps...
And if you have a Car Thing and don't know what to do with it, you can send it to me:
Josh Hendrickson
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#spotify #righttorepair
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I want to try to build a DIY "Car Thing," among other projects, and all of that takes time and money.
But most of all, thank you for coming, and thank you for watching. It's so amazing to see so many passionate people on this topic.
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.
I just want keep Spotify from bricking the device. I just don't get it, there are plenty of 3rd party Spotify players that just use Spotify API calls to show album info and play music. Its absurd.
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
the irony of this whole thong is that I can still use the latest version of the iTunes Client (yes,that still exsists) to sync music onto an iPod Shuffle from 20 years ago, yet I cant use a device I paid 3 times more for and a subscription, 3 years later, that dosent even connect to spotify servers
in the tech scene apple is known for supporting old stuff
then outside the tech scene apple is known for planned obsolecence
It's meaningful when people want to save this tech to be repurposed and also recognize the trash that is a Rabbit R1.
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.
I would buy a Car Thing for 15$... because modding it sounds like fun, but they are still pretty expensive (given the fact that they will be useless pretty soon)
$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
4gigs of flash, and 512 mb ram is plenty for an embedded linux!
this sounds cool!
Agreed, idk what OP's expectation was... To run crysis?
I guess those raspberries he says can run full blown os
Surely the solution here is to turn it into an AVRCP Bluetooth remote? If 10 year old car headunits get track data and album art from your phone using AVRCP, the car thing must be able to handle it.
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
The most ridiculous part of this is saying that the product failed because every new car has Spotify built-in. NOBODY DRIVES NEW CARS. There have never been so many old cars on the road as there are now. The whole point of this device was to support cars that had "dumb" entertainment systems but weren't worth adding an aftermarket head unit to, and Spotify fumbled the advertising so bad that no one got the message!
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
The car thing has easily enough resources to be turned into a macro pad. 512 MB RAM and a quad core 1.8 GHz CPU are more than enough for that. It just takes someone to write the GUI firmware for it. If someone wants to do that is the actual issue.
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.
I'm going to attempt to make a lightweight RTOS for this that just makes it a media player so that people can still connect to it and do the same thing they've always done with it!
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.
I think this hardware is perfectly suitable to handle audio-related tasks for a PC, like adjusting volume with a physical dial or changing EQ settings using the touch screen. I hope someone will see the potential to do something like this :) . High end DAC-s hame a similar interface, now, it can be one :) .
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
Quad core ARM 1.9ghz and 512mb and 4gb storage is "underpowered"? Brother, you certainly haven't done much embedded work have you. That is absolutely perfectly cromulent to run a ton of things. Kids today....
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
It can play San Andreas.
Can it run doom?
Ofc
"if it has a screen, it can run doom."
People gotta understand not everything can run web apps or electron-based bloated stuff. Browsers are incredibly powerful but are also an incredibly heavy load for older SBCs. Doesn't mean they can't do anything though! It might not be a fine computer but it has more than enough juice to be a peripheral. You just probably need to get your hands dirty in C on Python instead of JS.
the 512mb ram is enough for a lot of things in my opinion. my old ipad mini 1 has 512mb ram and 12gb od usable storage and it runs ios9. and the os on this thing doesnt even need to be as big as ios 9 to run basic stuff. my ipad mini can run youtube even now and back in the day i was able to play most 3d games on ios. so the storage and the cpu and the ram isnt a problem but its just that its not worth the effort to make it work.
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.
If spotify made the app with some lower level tech rather than using electron, they might've been able to make the app feel snappier and people would be able to DIY a car thing. 15$ for the Zero 2W and 40$ for adafruit touch display, i would imagine it won't be expensive for JLCPCB to 3d print the case (if you don't own 3d printer). It's insane how inexpensively you can DIY this thing without buying parts in bulk.
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++
I feel like bricking devices wouldn’t fly for long in the EU.
I loved my car thing, and it really is my favorite thing I've put in my car. It makes picking music to play in my car with my friends so much easier (since my phone doesn't have to be passed around and unlocked). I'm really hoping someone can find some way to keep most of it's functionality, as I can't really get anything better than it in my car :(
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!
I would like to see the raspberry pi become a car thing
Me too! Sounds like an awesome DIY project. Definitely would build one for my older car
That's crazy how softwares are resource hungry nowadays! When a was young I created a cash register for night club. It has a main touch screen, 3 serial terminals to take the orders, 3 serial printers, a RS422 link to a master computer for monitoring and prices unpdates. It was runing very well with PC/DOS on a 386SX a 16bits CPU at 20MHz so 0.02GHz with 2MB of RAM, so 0,002GB and 10MB, so 0.01GB of flash storage...
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? 🤣
Great video! I was sitting down with a Spotify designer last night and he also didn’t know about it being open source. I wonder why the source code was hidden in plain sight
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
I hear 512 MB and "can't run anything" together, and I'm shocked. You can do a lot with 64 KB, and a lot more with 8000 times that much.
That said, most people (including me) won't put in the labor because it's a lot more effort when you can't just drop in existing solutions.
All I'd want to use it for is media controls and saving songs to a general playlist, it doesn't have to be Spotify. It would allow me to listen to what I want in my old cars that don't even have a USB port on their head unit.
Hate having to pull over, grab my phone, and control media through my phone whenever a song comes on I don't want to hear.
Why are you saying car thing is underpowered? "Measley 512GB ram" so what? Its an iot device, not a desktop. "Cant even run a web browser" , who was asking for that?
It just needs to link to my phone and control Spotify, thats all I want. Thats the only reason I bought it, and it has done a fantastic job at that ... Very fast and smooth. I hope some just keeps it alive.
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.
So basically the problem is the world is lacking low level engineers? Lol, you can do lots with a random ESP with screen and buttons, but people want a complicated solution here, one this can't run
Hi ! So I think a ton of people are only really looking to just remove the Spotify premium requirement and prevent it from being bricked. If you're able to remove the spotify premium account, what is the hurdle to preventing it from being bricked?
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.
So are you suggesting the Car thing is actually a waste of time and someone should just build a succesor to the car thing from the ground up instead?
I have a old Arm7 MTK device with 512Mb of ram, 8Gb Ram, and Android 4.4. Even worse I have a chinese arm7 internet router that runs on 512Mb ram and 3Gb of Internal Storage. I rooted them and now run custom android versions on it.
I personally am a android hacker, I think i can help with the firmware if you guys have a discord.
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.
Can it run octoprint? It's have to connect to another frontend, but maybe as like a companion screen / interface for a pi?
Funny cause all of our cell phones in 2011 had the same had around the same specs. Reminds me of my HTC Aria spec wise
When I hear of 512mb of ram I think about PS3 and XBox 360 and what both of it accomplished.
Actually PS3 has 256mb of SYSTEM RAM plus 256mb of VIDEO RAM that worsen the difficulty to program it but also opens a new way of doing things and see what first party developers did with it.
I want to turn it into a Klipper Screen for 3D printers.
I know at least one person pulled this off, but I don't think they posted how they did it.
I really wanted one when it came out, but it wasn't really available in Europe :(
I just got a refund for it. Now I got a free useless piece of tech
hack the spotify Car Thing and install something else on it
how the HECK is 512 MB of RAM considered weak?
gtfo
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
Would really love a guide for a car thing from a pi zero! Subscribed to see it!
Would love to see you make a raspberry pi version!
Absolutely absurd that Spotify would brick this thing for no good reason. This is the kind of e-waste environmentalists should be focusing on
Disagree. I think you are not thinking light enough with your OS. If 512MB can't run a touchscreen these days I guess mouse and ARGB drivers are 600MB-2GB now. Oh crap with Logitech/Razer and MSI they are! I shudder to think the hours I played of high res 3d video games on a 486 with no graphics card and 4-16MB of ram because I didn't know any better! Forget the PS1 and its paltry 33mhz chip and 2MB RAM it couldn't possibly have months of engaging gameplay on a single career based racing game.
But seriously claiming its 'under-powered' to be an auxiliary touchscreen is a little disingenuous. True it won't run a modern desktop Linux or Android without a lot of paring down. Maybe a watch OS is better suited?
Please watch the whole video. Thank you.
Greetings from the developer of Macro Deck! Turning the Car Thing into a Macro Deck controller is a pretty awesome idea which I already heard on the Discord server. Maybe I try to get my hands on one of these and build a web based client, specially optimized for the Car Thing.
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. :)
I can't stop watching the souless Lego Mario figure at the back.
😂😂😂 It's a me. Mario. And I'ma comin' to get you.
That reminds me of the HP Slate - an early iPad competitor that actually was smooth to use just like the iPad - it didn't use Android OS - I think it was linux. Smooth as silk. Loved it until they killed it
I suggest installing an RTOS instead of linux with a custom LVGL gui instead of of electron. It'll boot instantly and be much more capable.
Heh.. a 4 core 64bit cpu and 512mb of ram is actually a lot, and can do a lot more than what you mention, if it weren't for the horrible bloat in most modern software which is written without much consideration for memory and cpu use (as both are cheap, while developer time isn't cheap). Something with the specs of this device would have been considered a super computer during the first decade of my career in IT, and probably for a bit longer than that.
Ah yes, the point of this comment, using it as some generic web browser thingy isn't going to go very well unless it is single tab and no heavy websites, oh, and with a rather streamlined browser. That has everything to do with the insane bloat of todays browsers.
But running some remote controller software on it locally would be something it should be able to do very easily. It should also be quite fine for running things like emulators for classic arcade games (ie: mame), 1980s era game consoles and home computers, etc.
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.
I'm surprised that nobody has reverse-engineered the Car Thing's software to make a version that functions identically, yet independently of Spotify, as a phone medial controller. If it simply maintained the play, pause, volume, and song scrubbing features (in the same way even a pair of bluetooth headphones can manage these things), its functionality would be entirely maintained, if not expanded.
Nice video! Glad I came across your channel before it blows up, you're definitely going places.
Never heard of this thing and I really want one now 😁
I sent mine to my country's Spotify office so that they can dispose of it correctly as Spotify has instructed.
Found the Louis Rossmann viewer! XD his video was brilliant.
@@anoraker Yes, got the idea from his video. 😂
Underpowered?
I have a Nokia Lumia 520, it only has 512 mb of ram, 1ghz dual-core cpu and it can run an entire os, multitask, play Spotify (and still works; well, at least like 4 months ago), and run 3d games. Yeah, it has 8gb of storage, but the Lumia 530 does the same things with only 4gb.
Many early smartphones have less capabilities than the car thing (at least in terms of processing), so calling it underpowered is... inaccurate.
6:04 "Anything more is too much for it to handle"
This, paired with "new chromium versions being too much" really just shines a spotlight on how embarrassingly poor "the web" runs nowadays.
The PS Vita has 512 MB of Ram and a quad core ARM Cortex-A9 (5 years older than the A53, though that doesn't necessarily mean the A53 should perform better)
and that handheld emulates PSP and PSx games just fine, along with running decent looking 3D games like Uncharted and Helldivers.
Looking at Ram alone, the PS3 ran GTA 5 Online until 2021 with just 512 MB!
Meanwhile the browser tab containing this video is eating 250 MB of Ram. Depressing.
I'm more baffled by how they didn't release this over to the EU.
Not many people buy the new shiny cars with the built-in monitors. It would've been quite nice to have if targeted to the right audience, wtf
Honestly, this thing seems super useful. I drive an older car, so using Spotify doesn't work unless I want to be on my phone. Having a physical thing with knobs and buttons that can control my music would be ideal; No touchscreen for me while I'm driving, thanks. Plus, it'd be great with friends messing with music. Spotify bricking it is disgusting, I hope people keep trying to make this thing work.
surely it could run an android auto or carplay client of some kind, i have an android auto screen thing that has 64MB of ram embedded in an allwinner f133-b and only a 128Mb (yes megabit) serial flash chip for the supposedly "Linux" os. the car thing is a supercomputer by comparison.
There have been fast and multimedi-media-capable multitasking computers with 512KByte of RAM ..
Would love to see how you turn a raspberry pi zero 2 into a car thing. I have an old bmw that I would love to build such a thing for.
Great video, thumbs up 👍🏻
Thanks for the work.
It’s really messed up given how much e-waste is now produced because of the fact that Spotify discontinued it.
I bought a Pioneer radio head unit with Spotify integration. Even after updating the head unit, I now have a useless function specific to Spotify that doesn't work.
It used to be really nice, because I could upvote/like or downvote/skip songs at the push of a button while keeping my phone in my pocket.
I got my car thing for $30 though I was an early adopter i was surprised when I found out that it was supposed to be a $100 device I think the price may have scared off most of the potential customers
If anyone has any suggestions for a new alternative I would be very grateful
I wouldn’t mind seeing the thing as a mobile display option that would be a nice way to prevent it from being junk in the future
Shouldn't we pressure companies for futureproofing devices that they sell? It is not like adding a simple micro sd card slot or usb trace would rise up price of this device, and that would be all to make it kinda useful. Way more useful (wasn't it priced on aroud 80 bucks? Isn't that a big budget to add something like this to the end device?). I don't know, i might be mad beacuse to this point i was thinking about super neat klipper host computer (man that knob + programmable buttons for klipperscreen), but gutting out battery to power it, getting ahold of usb hub , wifi dongle, pendrive for os and then watch it boot for good two minutes would be painful. Maybe it has some pads or something to easily solder more IO, but right now it's bad.
Nothing about Spotify is good for music, musicians or consumers. Artist's music disappears, is replaced by in-house rerecordings and original artists paid a pence additionally we've become used to lousy streaming quality. This latest move does not in any way surprise me. #enshitification
if Spotify can operate on android/apple auto, smart tvs, SANGUEN RADIOS!!!! then i see no reason why it cant continue to exist as it is!!!!
wish i could get my hands these things to play around with, but they weren't really sold outside the US it seems. At least here in germany people still want 100€ for a used one... Maybe I can snipe one when they have pulled the plug and people are left with a small bunch of e-waste. The nice thing about it, is that it comes in a neat little package with everything already attached and if they were cheap you wouldn't have to worry about bricking them...
bricking hardware, you purchased, honestly makes me want to cancel my spotify.
this is the kinda crap that made people pirate things, or find their own way without spending over priced sums to get what they want. forgoing things they might like, in favor of principles.
The specs aren't that bad. It's it's about equivalent to a 2013 smartphone. Once the bricking actually happens I'm sure there'll be plenty of people who will research and hack this device.
I always wanted someone to make a custom car thing that also shows lyrics so yeah I want you to make one and maybe try to add lyrics too?
the fault lies with any device being quote unquote custom, even iphones stop being supported despite sporting fairly robust specs, in an ideal world, we should have a generic device (read pc) and a custom chip (read boot drive) for any service so only the chip goes waste (reformat boot drive)
I don't think it is necessary to make the car thing into something that it isn't, you just need to find a way to prevent it from bricking and then develop homebrew. I am pretty sure it can be used as a deck of some sort or seperate input/output device for a pc, just not with the software that it can't bench.
how about emulator games. it's run faster than pi zero 2 w. have screen and Bluetooth (for file transfer & controller). and 480p is a good resolution for retro games. storage is a problem still
Im unsure why it needs to get bricked if it is playing the music through your phone anyway? This just seems like a really nice bluetooth device for your phone.
It would be awesome to hawe something kile that build on rpi zero, hell I would love if something like that was for PC to allow to change music without having to go to spotify.
Honestly the car thing is stupid after market touch screen radios plus the already built in steering wheels controls for music and the new infotainments like wtf was Spotify 5hinkkng
maybe macrodesk is under optimized... 512mb should be enough to run a webpage...
I think as a community we need to make this thing open source as a massive middle finger to Spotify, and not only that but make it to be able to work with other stuff like youtube, tidle, and apple music to name a few. This needs to be done to prove a point.
What a wierd take. Not worth hacking because it isnt powerful? But its powerful enough to do what it did with apotify, i think a lot of us would like it to just be hacked to do something similar without spotify.
Car thing isn't as Open Source as it can, it's as Open Source as it's legally required. Kernel is not nearly enough to call it Open Source
would love if you could do something with pi-zero and turn it into car thing.
512 ram, 4gb rom, can't run Android. That is a very accurate description of a 50$ phone i bought 10 years ago.
I want to buy one and make it a media control for UA-cam music, maybe like WebOs does on smart watchs? Im not an engineer but out there maybe is a crazy dude doing it
What about a control center for something like a Tesla. Gives you a knob, an extra screen and some buttons
I had no idea Car Thing existed. I probably would have bought it if I knew it existed, since I drive an older car. Kind of glad I didn't now that they're killing it. Oh well. My bluetooth receiver plugged into the car's 3.5mm jack works just fine.
I don’t understand why people bought this to begin with, they could have gotten a used iPod Touch, or one of those Chinese carplay/android auto screens. I mean why would people buy something that only works with a subscription and relies on a server. Stuff you could easily find out before buying.
I feel crazy, but I want something *just* like the car thing. I just want a spotify controller for my car or desk, with a wheel, touch screen, and some buttons. Every project I find always involves turning the pi zero into something even grander. I just want to either hack a carthing or make a pi device that looks nice enough and acts in the same way a car thing would. Just bluetooth connect, control spotify, that's it.
Samsung have started bricking watches, I hope this doesn't become a thing because we really won't own technologie if they can just turn off the products the CUSTOMER PAID for
never understand why people even buy this overpriced waste for the same price and size you can get an Android Auto or CarPlay device or for a bit more you can buy a whole new car stereo
if it does get discontinued it will go for cheep prices on eBay mabe even less then a raspberry pi 0 so if someone could make there software working i would totally buy for my pcs setup
please make this device usable somehow. would love it even as a picture display, or tiny monitor screen for the PC.
Lovely how companies are all being "eco friendly and bla bla bla" and then they do this and now it goes to waste because many people who bought it are no IT computer nerds haha. Also the owning nothing sucks! We should really change that and make companies serve us with their stuff and not we serve the company...
couldn't it be used as a device to interface with a raspberry pi? like, hook it to it and take advantage of the buttons and touch screen
This thing is now a bloody cheap and nice touch screen with actual buttons… I am sure someone will hack it to make something good out of it with a pi or even a pc
You completely missed the point the reason ppl used this was for cars without modern dashboards
For me, I'd rather have it do Home Assistant stuff. Maybe some ESP At Home stuff can be ported over, or just give it a lite version of a basic UI system.
I live in korea. I really wanted one of these things. They never released here to purchase. I recently left spotify. Happy i didnt get it.
please!I would love to see a tutorial on making a”youtube music thing” ive been looking for months!
Just gut the car thing and replace the insides with better hardware and then program the buttons and knobs to do different things
This gives me Detroit: Become Human vibes...interesting content anyway!
I dont need album covers and other crap just keep it working and put controls with song name on the screen
Please do it. Just do it. Make car thing great again.
when you put it like that its incredible they where asking for 99 dollars for the thing in the first place
man if they mod this thing they can deff add different music apps to add or play on. time will tell
Thinking about my homebrewed Nintendo 3DS they were tryna brick
Why not post your changes to the code, so someone could at least save themselves from a brick?