Spotify's Car Thing, due for bricking, is getting an open source second life | Hacker News Reader

Spotify's Car Thing, due for bricking, is getting an open source second life

arstechnica.com

132 pointsnickthegreek41 comments

What impressed me about this thing is how quickly it booted to an interface that was modern and responsive. It even had some pretty slick animations.

I’d be interested in how they achieved that. Looking at the repo it looks like the OS was just Linux. I wonder what the UI was written in.

IIRC it used Qt with QML and WebEngine.

Not that surprising given Spotify started as a Qt application before it became a webview.

I don’t think Spotify was ever a Qt application. Back in the day, it used a custom cross platform UI framework they called Spider. But it was XML based, similar to QML.

The early versions definitely used Qt on Linux

Would you happen to recall where you found that?

not the person you asked, but the spotify deb repository used to contain a spotify-qt package that later became a transitional package to the current package

I assume you’re referring to the desktop app? I’m more interested in what’s running on Car Thing.

Is there anything suggesting the old desktop app and the Car Thing app share technology?

found a source: https://www.qt.io/press/qt-provides-ux-framework-for-spotify...

It started as a win32 application without any UI toolkit other than the controls that are built into windows. That's how the binary could be only a few hundred kilobytes in size.

I love the dial interface. I wish more electronics, especially those in car interfaces, used a nice, clickly, big dial.

I agree! I love a nice big dial--my car still has them for volume, heat, etc., and I cannot imagine dealing with one that didn't.

I was at SXSW in ~2009. Got a free ticket to the interactive track. Was my first conference, and I was mostly disappointed that it just seemed to be a way for adults with salaries to get paid to go on a trip and party.

I do remember stumbling into the middle of a fascinating session on interface design for cars though, explaining the importance of having something tactile that driver can understand without taking their focus off the road. Nuts to see how the industry eschewed that wisdom in the decades to come.

If not phones, I wish there were at least phone cases with side buttons and dial or two.

(In the health sector, some device manufacturers replaced physical knobs with to touch screens and they suck so much.)

> Spotify had previously posted the code for its uboot and kernel to GitHub, under the very unassuming name "spsgsb" and with no announcement

Interesting. Why not make some tiny announcement about it somewhere?

I wonder if open sourcing it might have been a low(er)-level engineering decision, so there wasn't any marketing/PR awareness.

That seems like a likely scenario, some engineer started an email thread that ended up in their director's inbox who said "sure why not".

In a big company getting PR/Marketing to write an announcement can be a tall order, especially for a discontinued product that did not do very well and is mostly unknown.

This looks more like bare minimum legal compliance. The 4 posted repositories are all for (L)GPL licensed projects, so they're required to make it available.

Several years ago I had a similar situation: Company was discontinuing a product that sold poorly except with enthusiasts. Some of us wanted to open source it.

I don’t know how or why, but after pushing on legal for months the only solution they came up with was for us to post the code on an unattributed GitHub account. If asked about it we were supposed to shrug and imply that it was a leak without saying anything.

I do now know why legal came to that conclusion because nobody wanted to ask for details before they changed their mind. This legal department was very conservative on most matters so the decision surprised us.

Think about how bad the the Winamp open sourcing went. Try and do a favor to the public and all the skeletons in your code come out

Plausible deniability probably. There is a chance that they would not be allowed to make parts of that code public if it relies on third party dependencies that may have stricter licensing. Even if the unknowns do not prove substantial, legal would likely tread carefully.

From an eWaste perspective this is great news, it just seems to be a pity that Spotify themselves hasn't been leading or endorsing it.

(With the EUs continued focus on eWaste it also seems odd that the largest music service could just get away with bricking them all.)

Honestly, I don't see why a company should be required to expend any resources on something they've given up on and which they don't think is going to be profitable any more, as long as they don't hamper any efforts to reuse that equipment. So if they just make available the code and tools necessary for interested third parties to use it (so it doesn't become bricked e-waste), I think that's sufficient.

Perhaps for embedded computer systems like this, there should be an EU requirement for companies sunsetting products to simply make publicly available the tooling necessary to reflash them with new software, along with any other information necessary for hackers to get started.

I don't disagree IF they make tooling available for reuse.

Of course, I'd prefer they do that all along.

Apple and others should be forced to unlock its abandoned hardware. If they don't want to deal with it any more that's fine, but it shouldn't be ewaste.

I have an old ipad mini that is still super hardware but they won't permit new apps on it. I would love to wipe and put linux or something on but that's not possible. This behavior shows contempt for the customer and the planet.

I agree, I should have also added that any tools needed to unlock the hardware should be made available.

> Honestly, I don't see why a company should be required to expend any resources on something they've given up on and which they don't think is going to be profitable any more

Because selling shit you're going to brick 2 weeks later is literally against the law in the EU.

I never said companies should be allowed to abandon hardware only 2 weeks after selling it; that's ridiculous. Of course, they should be required to properly service it for the duration of the warranty period (which I think is 2 years in the EU, and seems like a good number that should be the minimum standard everywhere).

As far as I've seen, it was only sold in the US, so EU regs wouldn't apply.

i heard a legend that car thing was supposed to be released much earlier when it may have had more of a market, but production was delayed because all of their real world testing was in sweden and their first model was unable to handle dashboard temps in non-nordic countries. can anybody confirm?

Purchased one of these for $25 when they liquidated them awhile back for this day. Looks like it is best to flash deskthings with a powered usb hub.

That's a great price. I just looked them up on Ebay and it seems they're all going for $100+ now.

I wish facebook did this with the Portals. They are effectively useless for most of what they were intended to be used for and facebook continues to refuse to let them be opened.

Love it. I had one of these next to my kitchen sink at eye level and chromecasted to the kitchen stereo.

A big volume button was so nice.

Can't wait to flash this and resuscitate it

Here is another small project to revive the car thing with a clone of the previous UI written in Rust: https://devpost.com/software/car-thang

800x480 4" screen is pretty nice.

Big giant dial is sweet as heck.

Shocking that the Cortex A53 (12 year old core) is still so so ubiquitous, and not just on low end devices. Younger me would never have believed me that this would be the case.

> Shocking that the Cortex A53 ... is still so so ubiquitous

I'm sending this from my Librem 5 GNU/Linux phone powered by Cortex A53. And it's good enough to be my daily driver.

I had the car thing hooked up to a soundbar in my last apartment and it was great. I'm glad I'll be able to continue using it

Hell yes, FOSS FTW!!!

Now, I can't wait for someone to run Doom on that thing.

I have one and still waiting on an easy way to flash it on a Mac. So far it's either Windows or Linux. I'm sure it will come but for now it's kind of a chore.

I've been trying to get my hands on one of these for years, but they were only ever sold in the US and Ebay was either just full of scalpers, and now full of grifters trying to sell a near useless device for ridiculous prices as a collectors object. It's still e-waste.

spotify always changes stuff every week

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