Turns out Spotify can't open-source Car Thing because it's a potato
androidauthority.com
androidauthority.com
I’m a little confused by this statement — those specs are not actually that bad by any means. Running a full linux OS plus a web-based music player is a pretty heavyweight task, all things considered. It sounds like an ideal hacking device to me.
I'm seeing them on sale for the MSRP ($80) on the low end and $150-200 on the high end.
According to some other info I could find, the processor is an Amlogic S905D2, which is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 up to 1.896GHz.
> With a weak Amlogic processor, 4GB of eMMC storage, and only 512MB of RAM, the device is too underpowered to run anything more demanding than its intended lightweight web-based media player.
I own a Car Thing. All I want is to be able to continue to use it as a lightweight web-based media player in my car. Seriously, what else were people hoping to do with this thing?
> Tech journalist Josh Hendrickson revealed that the Car Thing runs on Linux and is actually open source. The device’s extremely weak specs make it impractical for running anything beyond its intended web-based media player.
Looks at ESP32's all over house.
I think what the author means is that 90 percent of devs wont know how to use it because it cant run the docker container with their code in it.
But most containers are doing an admirable job of containing shit... they let software run and not fuck up the underlying OS.
If you have to use a container it's a statement about the software in it more than anything else. And that isnt gonna run on 512mb...
Hdmi screen, rotary encoder, 2 buttons.
For the majority of devs out there, they would struggle to build something that runs on this platform without paging. It's not in their wheelhouse.
Most modern containers are a run time + a pile of other code (js/ruby/python/java)... So no, not just a single binary.
And even if you want to make the argument that you can compile all those down to a single binary... I would point out that you're going to run into their limitations around file system access, and c binding (to access local GPIO pins). Again you can over come these things, but you're likely going to have to do that on the underlying os, probably with some C...
If you dont compile down to a single binary, you have the FS access, and can install the c-dependancys in your container and everything just works.
The container is then doing its job. It's a bag separating all that stuff from spilling all over the OS it lives on and the env vars it creates. It does it well. It's why we use them.
If we could run single binary blobs, the use case for containers (for deployment) shrinks drastically... Isolating 2 version of an app with some networking for fast switching, and cgroups make sense on the server side. Less so on end user machines.
Writing portable, and installable software is a hard problem. Containers are an abstraction of those issues. I no longer believe that they are a good one.
This webcam exploration video outlines the process pretty well:
That assumes that u-boot isn't completely locked down (which many do for production versions), that secure boot isn't implemented, and that there's enough info about the kernel and u-boot known/available to enable a second life for such devices.
Unfortunately, unlike with x86, in the embedded ARM world everyone runs their own shit BSP that got forked off of upstream a decade ago (or more).
> On top of that, since it uses one of Amlogic’s chips, it has an easy access BootRom mode, just press and hole button one and four while plugging in. From here you can use ADB, bulkcmd, UART to run custom code, dump the source code, even add your own. People already have.
So, this is fine. It's odd to claim that something is e-waste because it can only be used for its intended purpose, which they thought useful enough that they bought it.
That may not mean "bricked" by a technical hacker's definition, but I think that's "bricked" by the definition of 98% of people who bought the thing.
This is exactly the kind of thing that would be a great controller for a 3D printer or similar CNC machine.
It can still be used as a media player, even if doing so will require custom software.
It could be an interface for home automation, smart thermostat, or daily planner.
People make all kinds of devices using similar hardware every day. Rather than rolling your own, here is one that will soon be cheap on all the used markets as the average owner has no further use for it.
The article is really overly critical of this. It's not a potato and it's not necessarily e-waste if it's easily reusable.
What hardware did the author expect this to have? It's a glorified MP3 player. We used far less powerful systems for that in the early 2000s. No doubt that chip is cheap and plentiful. Why would they use anything more?
The article strays far from reporting on the news and well into an opinion piece.
That knob is nice for smart home automation, in addition to a music player, I could see a thermostat, a light or fan control lots of things.
And a link to the mentioned GitHub source code of uBoot and Linux kernel for the device: https://github.com/spsgsb/
It has 4GB storage and 512MB RAM with a weak Amlogic CPU.
I don't think a specific type of code should ever be the goal, in a product, because the user doesn't give af.