I am pretty bummed that they are discontinuing it and not open sourcing the hardware. I use mine at my desk every day to control my desktop Spotify and it is pretty nice having hardware controls for my music.
I’ve been trying to buy one for months. Glad I didn’t. I was going to use it for the same purpose as you. I just love that knob. Wonder if I there’s something open source out there.
I missed buying one for $30 when they were clearing them out a while ago and recently decided I wanted one for my car so started looking on eBay - they're going for at or more than the full, original price! Maybe with this EOL announcement, the prices will drop and I can pick one up cheap to repurpose for something else.
It’s already rooted. Here’s the GitHub repo if you’re interested in rooting yours: “frederic/superbird-bulkcmd”
It looks like it might be difficult to write custom applications for it though based on this info in the GitHub readme:
“At this point we had full u-boot access, as well as persistent ADB (root) access, we initially wanted to try to bring-up Android Automotive on the device, but 500 MB of RAM made Android near-impossible to port.
We also tried to get other GUI applications cough maybe doom cough running, but this device utilizes a QT feature called EGLFS, which doesn't have a window management system like X11 or Wayland, so it is hard to get additional applications running on the device, but hey, maybe someone in the community can get it working using the access we're providing!”
Shame on Spotify.