The Death Knell of Car Thing > Connect to ESPHome Bluetooth Proxy?

[bai-yi-bai]

Thank you @bishopdynamics for creating this project.

I just read that Spotify will discontinue support for the Car Thing on 2024-12-09.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163383/spotify-car-thing-discontinued-december-2024

Presumably this means that they are deprecating the code in the Spotify mobile application, as well as any APIs which connect to the Car Thing. I am not complaining, I knew Spotify had abandoned hardware before I decided to buy them and I only purchased four of the devices because I saw that they had been hacked superbird-bulkcmd after seeing a couple very good product reviews. I was fairly confident the community would find a way to breath new life into them, and here I am. I simply placed them around my house to control my Spotify account which is connected to my snapcast multi-room audio setup. Now, I with Spotify abandoning them, and having made it clear they were done with making hardware, I am more adventurous about trying to hack them.

I am wondering if there might be a alternative to connecting to host single board computer. For example, would it be possible to connect the Car Thing to an ESP32 Bluetooth Proxy instead?

I have already experimented with an ESP32 configured as an ESPHome Bluetooth proxy to connect to a temperature and humidity sensors.

I apologize that I have not dug really deep into bluetooth messaging protocols, but I assume it is a very minimalist concept. Rather than trying to maintain a full network connection to a Home Assistant dashboard, I would rather try build a application to run on the Car Thing which monitors the physical buttons and sends the physical button presses over bluetooth to ESPHome. As a second part, I'd like to build a webserver which presents a minimal set of buttons which also send information over bluetooth. As a final "stretch", I'd like to see if it is possible to use a Home Assistant Spotify integration, to send playback data over bluetooth to this application.

With Debian, anything should be possible, right? I am thinking I could write a Python application to run on the Car Thing to handle the button presses and the on-device webserver. The only part I'm missing is connecting over bluetooth.