Yep! It took making a go daemon to access but it does technically work. Apps will have limited access to it (they need to have permission from the user - similar to phone apps) and then they can just connect to "localhost:8890" socket in their GUI and send 'start' or 'stop' to begin receiving audio!
Posts by DeskThing
I just managed to get the Car Thing to talk with an LLM - it's pretty neat
I know it happened almost a month ago - but if you want a neat recap of the last year of the car thing, there is truly no better resource I could point you towards!
Just made a new tutorial for setting up DeskThing
Huzzah! It's been nearly 7 months since I last uploaded @.@
www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW2b...
32 feet of raw USB power! Somehow it still works though. Anyone able to test further? This is all i got.
DeskThing just had v0.11.1 release! First update in 5 months - and let me tell you, it's been a wild ride
There's not much of the original code left anymore
www.reddit.com/r/DeskThing/...
deskthing.app/support
Hey just wanted to share that DeskThing will have a table at Teardown 2025 ✨
So if you’re in the Oregon area June 19th-22nd come over and join us!
www.crowdsupply.com/teardown/por...
Local audio is hard…
With the help of @joeyeamigh.com - we now have a new app called Local Audio which updates live to music state changes on Windows, Mac (theoretically) and Linux!
deskthing.app/support if you want to test it out before the public release (you’ll also have to join the discord)
quick preview of Thing Labs’ BridgeThing, coming soon!
this is the original spotify webapp running on-device with a custom Rust backend to connect to the phone
long way to go, but making great progress!
Finally off break ✨
Time to start DeskThinging again
TheBigLoud did a phenomenal job
Defo took a bit of inspiration from your quick draft ✨
Credit to TheBigLoud for this one!
He did a fantastic job making the website ✨
This image showcases the homepage for "DeskThing," a project aimed at repurposing the discontinued Spotify Car Thing into a desktop assistant. The tagline encourages users to "Take Back the Car Thing," emphasizing upcycling and reducing e-waste while boosting productivity. The interface includes buttons for downloading the latest release on multiple platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux), along with links to community hubs like Discord, Reddit, and GitHub. It also highlights the project's documentation and development progress tracking on Trello.
ooh, the new @deskthing.app website is super sick! (deskthing.app)
Merry Christmas Everyone!
There’s really no such thing as a “simple feature”
And if there is, I’ve never encountered it
This is the longest video I’ve ever published. But for the sake of getting our Spotify Car Things working again, it’s worth it.
Special call out to @dammitjeff.bsky.social for the great stand.
youtu.be/yYKXvpjppsE?...
Attention Kernel Engineers: The Spotify Car Thing revival project needs assistance with graphics acceleration. The device features a Mali G31 Bifrost GPU on an Amlogic S905D2. Currently, graphics performance is severely limited with Panfrost,
DeskThing v0.10 just dropped!!!
More details abt the release are on Reddit and Discord
For now, you can basically customize anything abt the app!
I wish you the best with that xD
Unfortunately we’ve packet sniffed the car thing and found that a lot of the Spotify-specific functions use some proprietary API endpoint that they’re shutting down
So since most of the computing doesn’t happen on the device - idk how long it’ll work last
F
The original Car Thing has officially just turned to Trash Thing - at least that’s what spotify wants for it
F to pay respects for the original operating system:
Really grinding to get this update out by Monday (the brick date)
I don’t think I’ll get all the features I want - but that’s what patches are for!!
Button mappings are 100% working though!
Hit follow while you were at 999!
Workin on the new client. A big focus for this one is customization.
Customizable button locations
Customizable colors
Custom MiniPlayer height
Custom fonts
Custom icons
You get the idea. Hopefully this will help you make DeskThing an extension of your setup - not just something on top
I think the car thing hacking scene has changed forever
@embed.dog really did something amazing with terbium
Hacking your Spotify Car Thing from ANY PLATFORM
youtu.be/RxUmyFUajiE
Hypee
Linus Tech Tips just mentioned DeskThing on the WAN Show
I think I've peaked as a developer.
www.youtube.com/live/rIQlOYS...
v0.9.0 just dropped and I'm genuinely so glad this nightmare has a good ending XDD
8 hours of nonstop debugging and banging your head against a wall has an effect on you - but it's just a daily experience as a developer