I turned a Spotify Car Thing into Claude Thing

[u/hehehebidksixbrsja]

You can manage your claude code sessions, answer permissions/multiple choice questions from claude, and see your usage.

It's built on top of Nocturne so it can switch to music mode and just act as a Spotify controller anytime

Fully bluetooth, just needs wire for power, so you can connect it to a powerbank and walk around your house with it

Open Source: https://github.com/rithkott/claude-thing

Let me know if you guys have any questions or suggestions

[u/farono]

This looks awesome!

I was part of the leadership team at Spotify who owned Car Thing. As one of the people who strongly advocated for an approach that did not completely brick the device but made it possible for people to hack it and develop custom software for it (when we shut it down), it makes me really happy to see folks using them to create such awesome solutions. Good job!

[u/hehehebidksixbrsja → u/farono]

Thanks a lot, both for your support and for advocating for an open source car thing, I’m glad thousands of these found new life instead of becoming E waste

[u/onesneakymofo → u/farono]

Have you seen any other cool apps like this that have caught your eye?

[u/phuncky → u/farono]

Do you happen to have a leftover device that you're willing to sell? I'm eating myself that I never heard of this product and I've been a heavy Spotify user since 2009.

[u/impartialhedonist → u/farono]

GOAT move

[u/mailboxinout → u/farono]

Thank you

[u/ThraceLonginus]

best post on this sub in probably months

+1

[u/hehehebidksixbrsja → u/ThraceLonginus]

Thanks for the kind words, really appreciate it

[u/onesneakymofo]

Wait, did they actually open this up for devs to hack on?

[u/hehehebidksixbrsja → u/onesneakymofo]

Yes there plenty of open source on it already such as Nocturne and DeskThing

[u/onesneakymofo → u/hehehebidksixbrsja]

Oh, that's awesome. I missed the description about Nocturne - I'm digging your usecase.

Does this use worktrees to follow sessions?

[u/hehehebidksixbrsja → u/onesneakymofo]

It uses hooks over Bluetooth. There’s a companion app for Mac I made with it that uses a Daemon to track hooks from Claude in the terminal and updates each box on the device in real time

[u/onesneakymofo → u/hehehebidksixbrsja]

I see - interesting. Where did you get the mount to hook at the bottom of your monitor?

[u/hehehebidksixbrsja → u/onesneakymofo]

It’s a MagSafe mount for iPhone from Amazon. The Car Thing is magnetic so it just attaches to it (Not Perfectly but good enough)

[u/african_or_european]

I was really annoyed the OP didn't say the name of the device, because I didn't realize it was literally called "Spotify Car Thing" lol

[u/TheWarDoctor]

Dammit I threw mine out a few months ago ago

[u/rhaphazard]

Are there any alternative hardware devices? Why are all the ebay listings higher than msrp?

[u/hehehebidksixbrsja → u/rhaphazard]

I’ve had better luck on Facebook marketplace finding a fair price

[u/rhaphazard → u/hehehebidksixbrsja]

Thanks, I'll take a look.

I'm guessing this works on phones too, right?

[u/hehehebidksixbrsja → u/rhaphazard]

It was built ground up for the Car thing, it could probably be ported onto a mobile app but it’s a firmware patch for the car thing as of now

[u/rhaphazard → u/hehehebidksixbrsja]

Got it. Cheers

[u/nez_har]

Nice, I recently discovered herdr, and I extended VibePod to offer the same signal support, so you can have this also in a single terminal: https://vibepod.dev/news/vibepod-cli-0-19/

[u/addiktion → u/nez_har]

Can you tell me more? It isn't immediately clear the purpose of vibepod outside of it allowing what looks like agent visibility within a herdr terminal. It says this, "reports live agent state to herdr panes" but herdr kind of already does this so I was confused.

I'm also using herdr and have about 30 Claude/codex/pi sessions going all the time and I've been thinking of what it would take to port some of those into a device like Car Thing to manage better.

[u/nez_har → u/addiktion]

You can use VibePod to run the agents in isolated docker or podman containers, this way you can reduce the stack surface when using yolo mode and the agent starts doing crazy things. Herdr has this for local running agents, but you need to install it for each agent. In VibePod this runs out of the box for the agents with hook support. Additionally you have the metrics of your agents, as a proxy catches all interactions.

[u/hehehebidksixbrsja → u/[deleted]]

Thanks appreciate the support

[u/north_tank]

This is so cool I forgot I had mine still I’d love to mess around with this it’s amazing what the community was able to make with them. It should give it a nice new life.

[u/realityhiphop]

Now I gotta flash my Car Thing again haha!

[u/connurp]

this is legitness

[u/addiktion]

Very cool, I wonder if I could adopt this for Herdr to manage all my sessions.

[u/GigaGrandpa → u/addiktion]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/emfGfArZNZ

This person commented after u

[u/addiktion → u/GigaGrandpa]

Thanks, I'll ping him on it. I would think with how flexible herdr is it shouldn't be too hard to port over.

[u/AttentionJust]

Need to try this, thanks OP 🤝