Photo Credit: Brandon Saldan
Spotify announced the Car Thing is discontinued and will be bricked on December 9 as the music streamer winds down support for its first hardware project. But developers have bought the project new life—so long as you don’t mind a little extra hardware.
Firmware hackers have been hard at work on creating an open source image that can be flashed to the Car Thing. Spotify only sold the Car Thing for around $100 bucks and the hardware reflects that—4” touch screen with a large knob for controlling the barebones interface. Spotify says the Car Thing was only supposed to be an experiment to “learn how people listen in the car.” It only features 512MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage, and an Amlogic S905D2 SoC— a real piece of shit for processing power.
That’s where Nocturne comes in as an open source replacement for the firmware on Car Thing. The only downside? The processor in the Car Thing is so crappy that you’ll need an additional Raspberry Pi to get it running. Brandon Saldan has released all the tools needed to get Nocturne running on the Car Thing for anyone who is interested in trying. It involves flashing the new Nocturne firmware to the device for use either in your car or at your desk.
Once set up and running, Nocturne features full playback controls, playlist management, artist and album exploration, real-time interface updates, and more. It’s intended to be a fully configurable replacement for Spotify’s Car Thing firmware, which will stop working in December when Spotify pulls support for it.
It’s interesting to see so many hackers interested in using the device as a desktop music controller. Saldan has supplied instructions for configuring the Car Thing with Nocturne via Windows, macOS, and Linux—so the device can be repurposed no matter which OS you use.
It’s worth noting that Nocturne relies on a Spotify Premium account to work (just like the original Car Thing). For anyone who was concerned about churning out more e-waste thanks to Spotify, you can now re-purpose the Car Thing as long as you can follow a simple set of instructions and have a Raspberry Pi at your disposal.