- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Title says most of it. Spin electric scooters exited the Seattle market and abandoned their scooters all over the city and apparently they have a pi 4 in them!
You must log in or register to comment.
This is such a terrible application. These things would drain their battery just running the pi and electronics. Why such a high power platform for such basic functionality?
This screams of free money flooding startups. Amateur hour.
I’m not intimately familiar with the BCM2711 but I believe it’s a reasonable, albeit somewhat overpowered, processor for the application. It can be put into a variety of low power states and probably pulled out of sleep by various events like the GSM chip sending packets or accelerometer motion (frequently the peripheral chips have dedicated “wakeup” pins that you can wire to interrupts). It’s not the most cost effective option by far, there are sub $5 microcontrollers with multiple cores for handling communications and real time motor control concurrently but you’d need to hire someone like me for a few months @$200/hr to write the low level drivers and design the boards. The rpi lets random web-only devs fumble their way through hardware development using whatever GitHub Python libraries they can find. If you only need a hundred scooters it makes more sense to just yolo it and buy up the remaining supply of rpis to start your grift.
Great explanation. I’d be one of those web Devs.
But why not an ESP32 or something that’s really well supported but better matched to their use case? Rpi screams ‘I read an article on how to connect my leds to Wi-Fi once’ levels of competence.
But I suppose if it was a half baked grift of sorts then it checks out haha. Even if that grift was more of an egotistical and not intentionally sourced grift.
Yeah, that’s the issue ultimately. The ESP32 chips are nice and easy to use but still pale in comparison to getting things working on a pi for the average developer without embedded experience. These devs may not even know they exist to be completely honest.
I was working with a buddy on a “startup” that was more of a hobby than anything (and didn’t go anywhere). The early prototypes were controlled by Arduino and Pis early on – ease of software development was key as we experimented with and dialed in the hardware. The later prototypes used an ESP32 though, because we’re aren’t idiots.
I’m a hobbyist at best: it kills me that there are well paid “professional embedded software engineers” out there that can’t work with actual embedded hardware. All I could think of was this article on electrical engineers that can’t solder. The complete lack of real world, hands on experience with the hardware blows my mind.
putting prototypes straight into production is the “tech startup” way!
Surely the drive motors use far more energy than the computer, and the computer doesn’t need to be fully powered on all the time.
Yeah they do. The device current issue is one of time. If they coded it properly they could keep the pi asleep at almost all times, but seeing as they used one in the first place I have my doubts.
Essentially it would make the scooter drain from just sitting vs being able to sit for weeks until a rider hops on.
It’s a lot cheaper than getting an EE to design you a more efficient bespoke solution.
Could just buy an ESP32 board instead, at least that doesn’t suck down power and need to boot Linux to function.
They probably could have used a Pico, certainly a zero instead of a 4
Oh so that’s why you can’t buy them anymore, people are using them as microcontrollers.
Pis are pretty commonly used in industrial automation use cases (production lines, robot arms, etc) too. They’re not the best thing for those use cases, but they’re far cheaper than anything else, and anyone with basic programming knowledge can get something running on them, rather than having to find someone experienced with embedded systems (usually in C or C++).
When there were major supply chain issues, a lot of the limited supply was going towards those use cases, as the companies using them had already placed large orders very far in advance.
It wasn’t just that they placed orders in advance. The pi foundation literally told people it was prioritizing those customers over anyone else. Kinda shitty IMO, considering the reason the pi was built in the first place.
“When there were”, implying you can find a pi4 in stock right now that isn’t from a scalper
I bought one from a microcenter two months ago. They were out of 4gb but had dozens of 8gb
Wait, a company can just decide to abandon hundreds of their hardware in the middle the streets?
Privatized profits, socialized loses.
Companies can just dump shit wherever when they’re done with it and have no responsibility to clean it up?
🌎👨🚀🔫👩🚀
It’s not abandoned property unless the finder doesn’t know who it belongs to.
If the name of the company is on the scooter, it is mislaid property, not abandoned property.
The classic bar exam question on this involves the finder of a bag of money. In one hypothetical, it’s a plain canvas bag. In another, it has the name of a bank on the bag.
When the name is there, you have to give it back. The finder only gets to keep it if after legal notice and a waiting period, the owner fails to reclaim it. In most states there is a statute on this, and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.
I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.
honestly, I would too. even though supplies are starting to bounce back (mainly in the USA, and I’m not in the USA), a free Pi is a free Pi. I generally can find uses for more pi’s…
What if the “bag of money” didn’t have any money in it at all, and the cost of recovering and properly disposing of the “bag of money” cost the legal owners more than what the bag and it’s contents are worth?
Oh, sure, it comes down to knowledge of the facts. If the owner manifests an intention not to recover it, then it is abandoned. But if you just find the scooter, or even if the company has said it’s going out of business, that’s not the same as having knowledge that the owner has no intent to retrieve the property.
Counterpoint: all of that is irrelevant if the legal owners don’t care enough to sue you.
and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.
This is probably paranoid, but I always assumed that a cop would get his cousin to come in and claim it, or that the station would just keep it and then be like “oh yeah… yeah the owner claimed that 2 days before the expiration period”.
Official protocols aside; this is exactly what would happen lmao
Oh yeah, I don’t know firsthand but I’d bet it’s pretty common.
It’s a legitimate salvage.
Remember the Cant!
I am that guy
Edit: someone doesn’t know the best quote: https://youtu.be/4dn76ZPt_Y0
Let’s go shuck some scoots, boys!
That was my first thought, get a few of them and create yourself a scootermox cluster 😂
Can you just take apart abandoned things for parts in the states? Probably just have to be a white male and no problems?
Probably, who is gonna come after you? The company has decided it is too expensive to repossess them.
in Germany it would count as theft and destroying of property of others even if it’s abandoned.
Technically it’s theft in the US too, but the owner doesn’t exist anymore so no one’s going after you (assuming cops don’t see you)
deleted by creator
What oppressed society do you live in where an item abandoned in the streets isn’t fair game? Does your realm not know the law of “finders keepers”??
Self-hosted scooter!
I swear they probably followed an instructables to found the startup…
