bridgething

bridgething is the bridge layer that lets the thing remain itself while opening up to anything you build for it. It runs on a fully custom Linux distro designed specifically for the Car Thing and replaces Spotify's stock qt-superbird-app with a Rust daemon, a kiosk web runtime, and a phone-side gateway, so the Car Thing keeps being a Car Thing on your own terms.

Install

Install from bridgething.com over USB. Updates after that come over the air through your phone, which is also where pairing, settings, and new apps live.

What's in here

path	what it is
crates/lib	libbridgething - the wire-protocol crate. DTOs, codec, framing.
crates/core	bridgething - the daemon
crates/client-rs	Rust client of libbridgething.
crates/mfi, crates/mfi-proxy	iAP2 / MFi link layer
crates/swupdate-sys	FFI to libswupdate for in-band system OTA
crates/delivery, crates/companion	The shared phone-side core in Rust, plus its wasm/napi bindings
packages/companion	Swift + Kotlin platform shells over that core
packages/{client-ts,browser}	The webapp TS SDK, and the delivery core for browsers
desktop/	Tauri shell over the shared core
packages/webapps/builtin	Webapps delivered with the daemon (hub, browser)
packages/webapps/catalog	Webapps published to the app catalog
packages/create-bridgething	bun create bridgething
mobile/	Phone-side app
docs/protocol.md	Wire-protocol reference

Dataflow

     webapp                       daemon                  gateway
┌─────────────────┐    ws    ┌──────────────┐   bt    ┌──────────────┐
│  hub / stock /  │◄────────►│  bridgething │◄───────►│   phone +    │
│  your own app   │ ws,asset │              │ msgpack │   companion  │
└─────────────────┘          └──────────────┘         └──────────────┘
    device kiosk                the thing               phone-side

The webapp talks to the daemon over a local WebSocket on 127.0.0.1:8891. The daemon talks to the phone-side gateway over Bluetooth RFCOMM, with an iAP2 link layer for iOS. The gateway sources playback, streams audio out, and proxies arbitrary HTTP/WS via the Tunnel surface. Everything that crosses a boundary is typed in libbridgething; the TS SDKs and the Rust surface facades are generated from those types, and the phone side reaches them through the shared Rust core.

Build a webapp

bun create bridgething

Creates a Vite + React + Tailwind project wired to the bridgething client. The manifest schema is in crates/lib/src/shared/webapp.rs; permissions, config primitives, and the KV namespace are documented in crates/core/src/state/webapps.rs and docs/protocol.md.

On-device dev

The image, OTA pipeline, and BSP live in yocto-superbird. Webapps push with bun run push from each webapp package. bun create bridgething comes with scripts for pushing to the device.

For host-side dev, the daemon expects chromium --remote-debugging-port=9222 running and a Bluetooth adapter with class 0x7c0000 (sudo hciconfig hci0 class 0x7c0000). Override the port with BRIDGETHING_CHROME_PORT.

On a device, chromium's DevTools endpoint is served at bridgething.local:9222.