Announce: Wall Thing - Debian Chromium Kiosk on Spotify Car Thing (superbird)

[bishopdynamics]

Since a lot of people are still lurking here, thought you might be interested in the progress I have made toward using the Car Thing as a kiosk for Home Assistant.

What I have now is Debian 13 in the data partition, using the stock kernel (on boot_a), with Chromium browser fullscreen showing a Home Assistant Lovelace page, and buttons controlling lighting and presets via Home Assistant API.

Here is the repo, : superbird-debian-kiosk

You can download a pre-made image here: Releases

Please see the Readme for flashing instructions

Requirements:

• Spotify Car Thing
• another device to act as host, such as Radxa Zero, Rockpi S, Raspberry Pi 4, etc
• a USB cable to connect the two
• power supply for the host device
• a desktop/laptop for flashing the image to the Car Thing

Features

Working:

• Debian 13 (Trixie) aarch64
• Framebuffer display working with X11, in portrait or landscape, with touch input
• Networking via USB RNDIS (requires a host device)
• Automatic blacklight on/off with display wake/sleep
• VNC and SSH (forwarded through host device)
• Chromium browser, fullscreen kiosk mode
• Buttons and dial used to control a light and recall scenes/automations/scripts on Home Assistant
• 256MB settings partition used for Chromium user profile

Available, but not used in this image:

• Bluetooth
• Backlight brightness control (currently fixed at 100)
• Audio (mic array, DSP)

Not working:

• Wifi
• GPU acceleration

WiFi is technically possible on this hardware, but the stock bootloaders and kernel disable it. It might be possible to cherry-pick the wifi information from the Radxa Zero device tree (practically the same SoC), but I think you would need to rebuild one or more of the bootloader stages to make it work.

GPU: the hardware has a Mali GPU, but the stock OS uses it via DirectFB QT library, and does not include necessary libraries to make it work with X11. It may be possible to grab the needed files from Radxa Zero.

[lmore377]

Awesome work! Just a note about WiFi, I don't think it's directly built into the SoC and I think the chip being used for BT is exclusively BT. Also about the GPU, newer versions of the car thing OS actually use chromium on top of Wayland so if you can get xwayland working that might be good.