Have you ever seen these bumper stickers about honking your horn? No, not these ones! Get your thoughts out of the gutter, this can be a family-friendly web site! I imply the current meme bumper stickers that say one thing alongside the traces of “Hold honking! I’m listening to” one thing or different, the place the one thing or different is often oddly particular or in any other case humorous. Anyway, when you have not seen one but, then you’re all however assured to see one subsequent time you’re out for a drive as a result of that’s how most of these issues at all times appear to work.
{Hardware} hacker extraordinaire Man Dupont, for one, is sort of obsessive about these bumper stickers. However he’s additionally bored with dwelling an enormous enormous lie of a life. You see, these are simply plain outdated stickers, so they could be appropriate about as typically as a damaged clock, however on the whole it’s important to stay with the information that you’re not truly listening to what you declare to be listening to. Unhappy.
To proper this incorrect, Dupont developed what he calls The Bumpin’ Sticker, which is definitely not a sticker in any respect, however fairly a high-definition show and handful of electronics that present different drivers what you’re listening to in real-time. This might burn you, after all, in the event you “unintentionally” discover that "Friday" by Rebecca Black, or something by Justin Bieber, makes its approach onto your playlist. However hey, at the least The Bumpin’ Sticker enables you to stay with a clear conscience.
The centerpiece of the construct is an 11.3-inch, 440 x 1920 pixel HDMI show. A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W single-board laptop is used to drive the display, and a Particle Boron growth board was included for web entry on the go by way of mobile networks. The elements had been scorching glued collectively earlier than being encased in heat-shrink wrap as a makeshift weatherproofing resolution. A window was lower into the heat-shrink wrap to reveal the display, and highly effective magnets had been used to maintain the system in place on the again of the automobile (to date).
The Bumpin’ Sticker was powered by splicing into the facility supply for the automobile’s backup digital camera. This supply had the additional benefit of solely being on when the automobile was working. That prevented the electronics from draining the automobile’s battery whereas it was not in use.
Dupont utilized a platform referred to as Val City to write down and deploy TypeScript functions that carried out just a few important features. Certainly one of these features scraped his public Final.fm profile to search out what he was at present listening to. This internet service was queried with the Boron’s mobile knowledge connection, which then handed the data alongside to the Raspberry Pi by way of Bluetooth. The Raspberry Pi then ran one other Val City script, however did so domestically. This script generated a PNG picture, together with the title of the at present enjoying tune, to show on the display as an digital bumper sticker.
To this point The Bumpin’ Sticker is working simply as Dupont had hoped. Whereas the {hardware} is rock-solid, the weatherproofing and magnet attachment will not be. However till it falls off or suffers irreparable water injury, Dupont plans to broadcast his musical preferences to everybody else on the highway with this uncommon gadget.
The Bumpin’ Sticker reveals what you are listening to in real-time (📷: Man Dupont)
Assembling the {hardware} (📷: Man Dupont)
A Particle Boron provides mobile connectivity (📷: Man Dupont)