r/carthinghax

I loved the Car Thing, so when Spotify cancelled it I tried building my own, and after a few sketches and a lot of positive responses, I decided to turn it into a real product. Full product spec on toastygear.com

A small desk controller with play/pause, skip, back, a Like button, and a volume knob, plus album art, track info, and a progress bar on a color screen. It connects to Spotify directly over its own WiFi, so there's nothing running on your computer and no companion app.

It's not meant to replace a jailbroken Car Thing if you enjoy tinkering. It's for people who want that experience to just work out of the box. Happy to answer anything about how it handles the Spotify connection, or what you'd want added.

I wanted live PC stats on my Car Thing. Couldn’t find a telemetry app that did what I wanted, so I made BrutalDash.

It started as something for my own desk. Now it has:

🎮 Gaming: Game detection, FPS, 1% lows, frametime, temperatures, VRAM, network latency, and packet loss.

🎵 Media controls: pull up a panel with album artwork, song details, and playback progress. Play, pause, skip tracks, and use the dial to adjust volume....all while keeping your dashboard visible.

🎨 Customization: build your own dashboard with selectable stats, different layouts, themes, colors, and your own logo and display name. Hold and drag to swap cards, then save your layouts to the four physical buttons.

🔋 Device batteries: supported headsets, mice, keyboards, and controllers, with charging indicators and estimated time remaining.

🧠 Local LLM monitoring: token speed, context usage, multiple GPUs, and total VRAM.

Free, open source, and built for BridgeThing. Windows PC required.

Take a look!!! The screenshots show it better than I can:
https://github.com/Brutal-BrutalFoundry/BrutalDash

Would love to see what it looks like on other people’s setups.