Spotify is making ready to show each Automotive Factor it ever offered into e-waste, however an open-source venture dubbed DeskThing desires to cease that taking place — by turning the soon-to-be-bricked in-car audio streaming devices right into a extra general-purpose system.
Spotify launched the Automotive Factor in 2021 as a devoted streaming system for in-vehicle use. Element shortages and low gross sales, although, put paid to the product only a yr after it launched — and in March this yr the corporate introduced it might pull server help for the system on 9 December 2024, a transfer that may render the few Automotive Issues the corporate managed to promote utterly ineffective.
That is the place DeskThing, delivered to our consideration by Liliputing, is available in. The open-source venture goals to maintain Automotive Issues out of landfill by making them usable once more — not essentially as a Spotify shopper however as a extra general-purpose system. “It presently expands on the Automotive Factor’s authentic performance,” says pseudonymous venture creator “Riprod,” “by eradicating the necessity for a Bluetooth connection to a cellular system, including native audio help (which permits the Automotive Factor to report info from different sources), and offering climate reporting.”
There is a catch, nonetheless: to ensure that any of this to work it requires the Automotive Factor to be related to a pc, therefore the “Desk” a part of “DeskThing” — turning it into, successfully, a secondary technique of interacting with the pc you have already got. The venture’s roadmap, although, goals to elevate this restriction in an effort to make the Automotive Factor usable with different units embody Android smartphones and Raspberry Pi single-board computer systems — to, in Riprod’s phrases, “get this venture to the place the Automotive Factor ought to have been at launch.”
With out DeskThing, or one thing prefer it, each Automotive Factor is heading for landfill in December this yr. (📷: DeskThing/Riprod)
” I am actually making an attempt my hardest to make the DeskThing a straightforward entry level for inexperienced persons to fiddle with actual instruments to construct their very own desk-side purposes,” Riprod explains. “What began as a passion venture has changed into a ardour venture. We hope to proceed to enhance the DeskThing and make it a staple within the lives of our customers. We hope to proceed so as to add new options and enhance the consumer expertise, making the DeskThing a greater product for everybody. Take again the Automotive Factor.”
DeskThing downloads can be found on the venture’s web site; supply code is accessible on GitHub below the permissive MIT license.