Old Spotify Car Thing Hacks Gain New Attention

May 30, 2024 by 26 Comments

If you haven’t heard by now, Spotify is shutting down support for their “Car Thing” on December 9th of this year. Once that happens the automotive media player will officially be useless, with users being advised to literally throw them in the trash come December 10th. Call it an early Christmas present from your friends at the multi-billion dollar streaming company.

Surely the hardware hacking community can do a bit better than that. As it turns out, there’s actually been a fair amount of hacking and research done on the Car Thing, it’s just that most of it happened a couple years back when the device first hit the market. Things stagnated a bit in the intervening years, but now that the clock is ticking, there’s far more interest in cracking open the gadget and seeing what else we can do with it.

[lmore377]’s Car Thing macropad hack from 2022.
The car-thing-reverse-engineering repository on GitHub has a wealth of hardware and software information, and has been something of a rallying point for others who have been poking around inside the device. Unsurprisingly, the Car Thing runs Linux, and with relatively minor work you can gain U-Boot and UART access. With just 512 MB of RAM and a Amlogic S905D2 chip that’s similar to what powers the Radxa Zero, it’s not exactly a powerhouse. Then again, we’ve seen plenty of awesome projects done with less.

If you’re more into the step-by-step approach, security researcher [Nolen Johnson] did a write-up about getting access to the Car Thing’s internal Linux system back in 2022 that’s certainly worth a look. As you’d imagine, there’s also a few YouTube videos out there that walk the viewer through gaining access to the hardware. This one from [Dinosaur Talks Tech] not only provides a good overview of how to get into the system, but covers flashing modified versions of the stock firmware to unlock various features and tweaking the internal Linux OS.

Interestingly enough, while we’ve seen plenty of homebrew hardware players for Spotify over the years, this is the first time the Car Thing has ever crossed our path. Something tells us though that this isn’t the last time we’ll hear about this forlorn Linux gadget.

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Walking Through A Scene From Riven On The Apple II

May 30, 2024 by 8 Comments

Twenty years before the 1997 release of Riven – Cyan’s sequel to the critically acclaimed title Myst – a fruity company in California released the Apple II, a 6502-based microcomputer that would be produced until 1993. With the upcoming remake by Cyan of Riven into a fully 3D experience, [deater] found themselves wondering how much of the original game’s click-and-puzzle game would fit on a 140 kB floppy for the Apple II series of computers. Since Myst was able to be squeezed  onto a mere three floppies and provide a reasonably playable version of the game on the Apple II, surely the same could be done for this sequel?

The Maglev in the Apple II port of Riven. (Credit: [deater])
The Maglev in the Apple II port of Riven. (Credit: [deater])
Just a look at the system requirements for Riven (Win95+, 100 MHz Pentium, 16 MB RAM and 75 MB disk space) and the knowledge that the game came on five CD-ROMs (until the DVD release) should instill some trepidation that a serious demake would be needed. Ultimately [deater] managed to set the system requirements for the port to any Apple II with at least 48 kB of RAM. The same custom game engine as for the Myst port is used, with the original CG stills downsampled and the movies rotoscoped at fairly low framerate.

Although the ‘Disk 39’ in the video is currently the sole floppy, containing part of Dome Island and the Maglev, it is probably a fair assessment of how many 140 kB disks would be needed to port the entire game. Even with the downsampled graphics, [deater] reckons it would take on the order of hundreds of floppies to fit the whole thing.

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CH32V003 Provides Ultra Cheap Speech Recognition

May 30, 2024 by 6 Comments

Speech recognition was once the stuff of science fiction, but it’s now possible with relatively modest hardware. Just how modest, you ask? How about a 10 cent microcontroller?

[Brian Smith] has achieved a very basic form of speech recognition on a CH32V003 RISC-V microcontroller. It may only recognize spoken digits, but that it does so at all on such a modest platform is impressive in itself.

For training purposes it enlists the help of a desktop Linux computer, however the recognition process is purely in the ten cent chip. He goes into much detail about how it achieves this on a system without floating point arithmetic, as well as the other shortcomings of such a limited platform.

We’ve become used to thinking of super-cheap chips as of limited use, but the truth is they’re surprisingly more capable than expected. We’re seeing them starting to appear as subsidiary processors on some badges, so it will be interesting to see them proliferate in more projects now their availability problems have eased. Go on – for ten cents, what do you have to lose?

Tiny Orrery Is A Watchmaker’s Tour De Force

May 30, 2024 by 3 Comments

Six tiny gears, a few fancy pins, and some clever casting are what it takes to build this tiny orrery. And patience — a lot of patience, too.

As model solar systems go, this one is exceptionally small. Its maker, [Mike] from Chronova Engineering, says it measures about 20 mm across and qualifies as the smallest orrery around. We can’t officiate that claim, but we’re not going to argue with it either. It’s limited to the Sun-Earth-Moon system, and while not as complete as some other models we’ve seen, it’s still exquisitely detailed. The gears that keep the Moon rotating 12.4 times around the Earth for each rotation of our home planet around the Sun are tiny, and take an abundance of watchmaking skill to pull off.

The video below shows the whole process, which is absolutely entrancing to watch. There are some neat tricks on display, from milling out the arms of the main wheel using a powered tailstock spindle to casting the Sun from resin in a silicone mold. The final model, with the model Earth and Moon spinning around the Sun on delicate brass wheels, is a visual treat.

We’ve seen some interesting stuff from Chronova Engineering lately, including this bimetallic tea timer.

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Can You Hear Me Now? Try These Headphones

May 29, 2024 by 12 Comments

When you are young, you take it for granted that you can pick out a voice in a crowded room or a factory floor. But as you get older, your hearing often gets to the point where a noisy room merges into a mishmash of sounds. University of Washington researchers have developed what they call Target Speech Hearing. In plain English, it is an AI-powered headphone that lets you look at someone and pull their voice out of the chatter. For best results, however, have to enroll their voice first, so it wouldn’t make a great eavesdropping device.

If you want to dive into the technical details, their paper goes into how it works. The prototype uses a Sony noise-cancelling headset. However, the system requires binaural microphones so additional microphones attach to the outside of the headphones.

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The Genius Of Slide Rule Precision

May 29, 2024 by 50 Comments

Most people have heard of or seen slide rules, with older generations likely having used these devices in school and at their jobs. As purely analog computers these ingenious devices use precomputed scales on slides, which when positioned to a specific input can give the output to a wide range of calculations, ranging from simple divisions and multiplications to operations that we generally use a scientific calculator for these days. Even so, these simple devices are both very versatile and can be extremely precise, as [Bob, the Science Guy] demonstrates in a recent video.

Slide rules at their core are very simple: you got different scales (marked by a label) which can slide relative to each other. Simple slide rules will only have the A through D scales, with an input provided by moving one scale relative to the relevant other scale (e.g. C and D for multiplication/division) after which the result can be read out. Of course, it seems reasonable that the larger your slide rule is, the more precision you can get out of it. Except that if you have e.g. the W1 and W2 scales on a shorter (e.g. 10″) slide rule, you can use those to get the precision of a much larger (20″) slide rule, as [Bob] demonstrates.

Even though slide rules have a steeper learning curve than punching numbers into a scientific calculator, it is hard to argue the benefits of understanding such relationships between the different scales, and why they exist in the first place.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 785: Designing GUIs And Building Instruments With EEZ

May 29, 2024 by 8 Comments

This week Jonathan Bennett chats with Dennis and Goran about EEZ, the series of projects that started with an Open Source programmable power supply, continued with the BB3 modular test bench tool, and continues with EEZ Studio, a GUI design tool for embedded devices.

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