You’ve probably seen a few bumper stickers along the lines of “Keep honking! I’m listening to…” followed by some song you may have never heard of. They’re so trendy that one intrepid Raspberry Pi guru decided to take the fad up a notch. He created a digital bumper sticker for his car that tells those behind him precisely what song he’s listening to at the moment.
The maker is named Guy Dupont, and he calls his project the “Bumpin’ Sticker.” Naturally, this isn’t a sticker at all. Instead, it’s a Pi-driven HDMI display attached to the lift gate of his Chevrolet Equinox with powerful magnets.
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How the Bumpin’ Sticker works
Dupont fully automated the digital signage on the back of his ride so that he doesn’t have to do anything to turn it on. He wired the project into his car battery to turn on when he starts the car and power down when he turns it off. Otherwise, the Raspberry Pi and display would always be on, draining the car’s battery.
As demonstrated in his video, Dupont takes care not only to weather-proof his digital bumper sticker but also to prevent the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W from shorting out. He wrapped the entire assembly in heat shrink and used hot glue to seal the exposed edges around the display.
Thanks to an internet connection and a tool called Val Town, the Raspberry Pi polls the social music discovery site Last.fm to find out what song Dupont is currently playing on Spotify. Then, Val Town parses that information and creates a graphic for the display.
Originally, Dupont was going to use his phone’s wireless hotspot to provide internet access to the Raspberry Pi. Then he came across a secondary board to plug into the Pi that has a cellular modem for connecting to data.
He doesn’t have to pay a service fee, but says the data allowance is relatively small. That doesn’t matter for this Pi project though, because the Val Town scripts run entirely on the SBC and only make small text requests to obtain the song information. The script even creates the image file on the Raspberry Pi, eliminating the need to download image files whenever a new track starts playing.
The current state of the project and what’s to come
Dupont outlines how he built the Bumpin’ Sticker in broad strokes, but his video is detailed enough that a skilled Pi user should be able to replicate the project just by watching.
He also plans to share all the build details and the project’s source code on his GitHub repository in the future.
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source: https://www.xda-developers.com/raspberry-pi-bumper-sticker-music-playing-car/
