Spotify's Car Thing, Due For Bricking, Is Getting an Open Source Second Life (arstechnica.com) 15
If you have Spotify's soon-to-be-bricked Car Thing, there are a few ways you can give it a new lease on life. YouTuber Dammit Jeff has showcased modifications to Car Thing that makes the device useful as a desktop music controller, customizable shortcut tool, or a simple digital clock. Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy reports: Spotify had previously posted the code for its uboot and kernel to GitHub, under the very unassuming name "spsgsb" and with no announcement (as discovered by Josh Hendrickson). Jeff has one idea why the streaming giant might not have made much noise about it: "The truth is, this thing isn't really great at running anything." It has half a gigabyte of memory, 4GB of internal storage, and a "really crappy processor" (Amlogic S905D2 SoC) and is mostly good for controlling music.
How do you get in? The SoC has a built-in USB "burning mode," allowing for a connected computer, running the right toolkit, to open up root access and overwrite its firmware. Jeff has quite a few issues getting connected (check his video description for some guidance), but it's "drag and drop" once you're in. Jeff runs through a few of the most popular options for a repurposed Car Thing:
- DeskThing, which largely makes Spotify desk-friendly, but adds a tiny app store for weather (including Jeff's own WeatherWave), clocks, and alternate music controls
- GlanceThing, which keeps the music controls but also provides some Stream-Deck-like app-launching shortcuts for your main computer.
- Nocturne, currently invite-only, is a wholly redesigned Spotify interface that restores all its Spotify functionality.
How do you get in? The SoC has a built-in USB "burning mode," allowing for a connected computer, running the right toolkit, to open up root access and overwrite its firmware. Jeff has quite a few issues getting connected (check his video description for some guidance), but it's "drag and drop" once you're in. Jeff runs through a few of the most popular options for a repurposed Car Thing:
- DeskThing, which largely makes Spotify desk-friendly, but adds a tiny app store for weather (including Jeff's own WeatherWave), clocks, and alternate music controls
- GlanceThing, which keeps the music controls but also provides some Stream-Deck-like app-launching shortcuts for your main computer.
- Nocturne, currently invite-only, is a wholly redesigned Spotify interface that restores all its Spotify functionality.
Re: AmLogic S905 is pretty good (Score:2)
Really Crappy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Could someone explain to me how a quad-core 1.8GHz ARM is, "really crappy?" Is the memory interface slow? Is it cache-starved? Are the on-board peripherals gobbling up all the RAM (GPU, video, etc.)? I don't imagine it's a speed demon even by 2005 standards, but given that's it's not doing any heavy work, it should be just fine. What am I missing?
(Now a Marvell 88MC200... That's really crappy...)
Re: Really Crappy? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
ARM is just an instruction set. They vary greatly in capability between implementation and looking at just speed doesn't tell you much at all (especially for an SoC where the peripheral interconnects are critical). Think of something like an Apple M4 absolutely annihilating a Microsoft SQ2 despite on paper only having a 18% clock speed advantage.
All the clock ticks in the world don't help if it takes many of them to get a job done.
Re: Really Crappy? (Score:2)
Kids today are spoiled. That's a HUGE amount of resources for an embedded device. The spaceships that went to the moon and back had 1000 times less CPU and 100 times less memory and storage.
But - GASP - you might not be able to run a web browser on it, in order to run JavaScript, in order to print "hello world". Might have to do some actual programming instead.
Spotify's marketing department really blew it (Score:2)
Mark my words... if they'd just named it "Car THANG", it would've sold like hotcakes!
Only weak by modern standards. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Apollo flight computers ran a program LITERALLY knitted into a read only memory by little old ladies. It's a bit cramped for shoehorning a desktop OS in, but FreeRTOS should have plenty of room.
Re: (Score:2)
That might be the firmware/rudimentary OS.
The rest was free programmable.
They even had a "chord keyboard" on bord and a big pile of paper with printed code/programs, to change the flight computer "on the fly".
The programmerix is still alive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
It's a bit cramped for shoehorning a desktop OS in, but FreeRTOS should have plenty of room.
Then it becomes a question of capabilities and I/O. It's not sufficient to just run something, you want to be able to do something useful with the end result as well. It reminds me of those videos you see of people running Doom on anything from bacteria to pregnancy tests. Ever wonder why the player always moves the same way in those videos? There's no input capabilities, they can only run a scripted demo which leads me to my point: Running Doom shouldn't be the goal. Playing Doom should be.
It's not a quest
Re: (Score:2)
It has at least enough I/O to handle a touchscreen, network connection, and analog audio out.
How is it legal? (Score:2)
For a company to deliberately brick something someone has paid for? Offering a refund can't be the get out clause they think it is otherwise you could just punch someone in the face, knock their teeth out then offer them cash in compensation and assume that means the law no longer applies.
Re: (Score:1)
Why even buy this to start with ???? (Score:1)