Displaying Spotify Artwork on a Pixoo 64

I bought a Divoom Pixoo 64, a chunky 64×64 pixel display. The idea came from reading tenderlove's article about controlling one with Ruby. A display that I could control programmatically sounded like fun.

What I wanted was somewhere in the room that would always show the artwork for the music I was listening to. I use Spotify and usually play it through the speakers in my room from either my computer or phone, but I see the album artwork much less often than I expected. When listening on shuffle, I also regularly wonder what the current track is.

So I had my AI coding assistant implement it. More precisely, I built it about seven months ago and have been using it every day since. I recently tidied it up a little and published it:

• hotchpotch/pixoo-spotify

The Pixoo API documentation is not exactly easy for humans to read or use. An AI coding assistant can still make sense of it and implement what I need, which is convenient. The API itself exposes a surprisingly broad and useful set of features, so perhaps having the documentation available at all is enough.

Here is what it looks like 👇

With only 64×64 pixels, the artwork naturally takes on a pixel-art look. I am very happy with it. Kawaii.

For text such as the track title, the program overlays the 8-point Misaki Gothic pixel font, builds a GIF, and sends that to the display. Tiny pixel fonts are a blessing. The program runs on a spare Raspberry Pi.

Because it polls the Spotify API, the display takes a moment to react when the track changes. It would be nice if Spotify exposed these changes as events.