New simple desktop companion CFW for the CarThing called thingFX!
Hey everyone
As a huge fan of GlanceThing and LumiThing I've now made my own fork and built on top of them. For now there's only Windows Support with Mac OS and Linux support coming very soon. Main features at the moment:
🎵 Now Playing — album art backgrounds (full, thumbnail, or extra large), track info, seek bar, playback controls, and a music spectrum visualizer with automatic accent colors pulled from the album art.
🚀 App Launcher — launch apps on your PC straight from the Car Thing's touchscreen. Add shortcuts with custom icons in the companion app, and optionally show a "Lock PC" tile.
🎛️ Physical controls — the dial controls the player volume, your system (Windows) volume, or seeking; the back button switches views; and each of the 4 top preset buttons can launch a shortcut, lock your PC, or shut it down.
🖥️ Multiple Car Things — connect more than one device at the same time. The Devices page shows every Car Thing that's ever connected, lets you rename, reboot, or forget them, and gives each device its own settings profile (main screen, wheel behavior, theme, and background) — so one can be a music controller while another is an app launcher.
🌙 Sleep timer & screensavers — the screen dims to a clock, aurora, or custom screensaver when nothing is playing and the device is idle, and wakes automatically when playback starts.
🎨 Themes & layout — dark, light, glassy, and aero themes, landscape or portrait orientation, and a configurable main screen (Now Playing or App Launcher) with automatic return after inactivity.
⚡ Quality of life — auto-start with Windows, automatic device recovery after PC reboots, automatic client reinstall on reconnect, weather in the status bar, and live-syncing settings (no reinstall needed for most changes).
Check it out at: https://github.com/abrendan/thingFX
Let me know any ideas you may have. I'm planning to support this long term.