r/carthinghax

A month ago I released Mira 1.0, a standalone, free and open source firmware for the Car Thing. Thank you to all the support the project has gotten, and all the bug reports that help me continue to improve Mira.

Mira still has a long way to go to deliver the complete experience I'm aiming for (support for more music platforms, a UI redesign, and more). It's built entirely in my free time, so if you'd like to support development the links are in the comments, and supporters also get access to beta builds. Every bit genuinely helps and it's what makes this sustainable to keep working on.

What's new:

Clock screensaver
Bigger playback buttons
Customizable UI scale (thanks to Serubin on GitHub)
Volume fixes for Android and iPhone
Update notifications (Mira will now notify when a new version is released)
Language fixes
Progress bar on first time setup
Many more bug fixes!

Flashing is also much more simpler now, full instructions on flashing and setting up in the comments!

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).

https://preview.redd.it/dl4hh8bsb7jh1.png?width=800&format=png&auto=webp&s=2e3c76a49ac08b14627bef0fd82825afca273b85

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.

[Annoucement] Mira 1.1 - Increased control button sizes, Clock screensaver, many more and bug fixes

Simple battery hack

New simple desktop companion CFW for the CarThing called thingFX!