Lilbits: New software can breathe new life into discontinued hardware

Google announced two years ago that it was killing its short-lived Stadia game streaming service. and while the company was refunding customers who’d purchased games and hardware, folks who’d purchased the Stadia Controller weren’t thrilled that Google’s original plans would have led to the device becoming useless once the servers shut down.

Fortunately Google later released a tool that would let users convert the Stadia Controller into a Bluetooth game controller that could be used with other devices. And while the tool was only supposed to be around for a year, Google later extended its lifespan… and now the company has quietly done it again. So if you’ve got a Stadia Controller lying around, or find one in a garage sale, you’ve got at least until the end of 2025 to turn it into a Bluetooth controller.
Stadia Controller (Google)
Meanwhile Spotify is taking a very different approach with its short-lived Car Thing accessory that was designed as a wireless display and controller for streaming music in an automobile. After announcing earlier this year that it would discontinue all support for the Car Thing, the company has indeed begun to shut down its servers, and users are seeing messages letting them know that their devices will no longer work.

There is an active community of hardware hackers that have found ways to repurpose the CarThing for use as a DeskThing or for other purposes. But there’s no particularly easy way to get it to serve its original purpose… at least not yet.

Stadia Controller Bluetooth mode [@Wario64]

Google has quietly extended the deadline for turning the discontinued Stadia Controller into a Bluetooth game controller that can be used with a wider range of devices. The utility will now be available until at least Dec 31, 2025.

Car thing is officially dead [/r/CarThing]

Spotify is killing off support for the Car Thing today. It appears to be a phased rollout, but many users are now seeing a message saying their devices are no longer operational. Hackers have found new uses for the hardware… but not in cars, for the most part. via /r/CarThing (reddit) and Thing Lab (Discord)
/u/ballsandbiscuits

What’s next for Surface in 2025, including a possible 11-inch mini Surface Laptop? [Windows Central]

Report: Microsoft could launch new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models in 2025 with Intel Lunar Lake chips, as well as a new Surface Laptop Studio (might be Intel or AMD) and maybe a new 11 inch Surface device with Snapdragon X.

Compact RISC-V Linux Development Device with USB Form Factor Powered by Rockchip RV1103 [LinuxGizmos]

The Luckfox Pico WebBee RV1103 looks like a USB flash drive, but it’s a tiny computer with a RV1103 processor with a 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A7 CPU and a RISC-V microcontroller, 64MB of DDR2 memory, a128MB of SLC NAND flash storage, and a microSD card reader and 10/100 Ethernet port. It sells for $14.

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