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E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters
- tekeous 3y agoThe robot delivery units from Starship Robotics are also largely off the shelf components including a Raspberry Pi and 4G hotspot. It’s cheaper to buy Pis and make your startup than it is to make something yourself, which is equal parts impressive and sad.
- RIMR 3y agoThis is just a shitpost as far as I can tell. Spin left Seattle a long time ago, so if you happen to find a scooter somehow, I guess there's a RPi4 in it...
- atsushin 3y agoGood point. Going to revise the title
- jacquesm 3y agoIn other news, mysterious scooter disappearance in Seattle leaves authorities baffled.
- mhb 3y agoSo Spin is abandoning the scooters or their leaving is justification for looting? Also, if people are looting, isn't the more desirable thing the scooter?
- constantly 3y agoLegally, abandoned property (at least at common law, not sure about Washington state) is up for grabs. Claiming abandoned property is not looting and not only is there nothing wrong with it ethically or legally, it’s probably for the best that it is out to reasonable use.
- mhb 3y agoYes, so are they abandoning them, or plan to pick them up and use them somewhere else?
- constantly 3y agoI don’t know anything about their actions surrounding the pull out from Seattle, and that’s what a court would look at. It does seem reasonable that if one were pulling out of a region and they had gps coordinates of all their assets, they would quickly collect them all. If they didn’t do that, that’s probably a strong argument that they were abandoned. If they are in the process of doing that and it’s only been a short period of time since they announced, that’s a strong argument that they’re not abandoned. Really context pointing toward intent is king here.
- thatguy0900 3y agoIf anything the pis are the payment for disposing of the companies trash for them. They should be getting a fine for something like that, much less call it looting.
- fragmede 3y agoWell, and that scooter attached to the pi. Those things go for a couple hundred bucks. Renovating it to be your own supposedly shouldn't be all that hard.
- atsushin 3y agoYeah, based on the other comments below I've revised the title. But if Spin left Seattle and didn't bother to properly clean up their scooters off the streets, it's fair game for anyone to pick up and dismantle what effectively is a lug of e-waste.
- cbarrick 3y agoSpin moved out of Pittsburgh recently (the law allowing them to operate was not renewed in the PA state legislature). They responsibly and quickly gathered up (almost) all of the scooters in one weekend. Maybe 0.1% of the scooters remain, likely due to the battery being dead and tracking being difficult. So in my experience, I believe they are acting in good faith when exiting a city.
- Animats 3y agoWhat, they weren't required to collect them up and dispose of them properly?
- paulcole 3y agoNobody’s required to do anything, especially a company that’s likely to go out of business and be sold for scrap in the near future.
- sschueller 3y agoIn Zürich Switzerland after the first bike startup failed and left all it's bikes littered around the city any new startup has to put down capital for the cleanup before they get any permit now.
- Animats 3y agoDockless scooter and board companies usually need a license from the municipality, because they are using city property for storage space. Dallas regulations [1]. Seattle regulations [2]. Spin was licensed as Seattle's fourth dockless scooter service in 2021. That's what Spin didn't like - competition.[3] "Open permit markets are places where multiple scooter companies can run businesses, with no caps on fleet sizes. Bear (Spin CEO) said they "create an uncertain operating environment" with "race to the bottom pricing." Apparently, Spin gets double the revenue in (non-competitive markets) compared to locations with a free-for-all market. Er, that's how capitalism is supposed to work. They can't handle a free market. [1] https://dallascityhall.com/departments/transportation/Documents/073122_DOCKLESS.pdf https://dallascityhall.com/departments/transportation/Docume... [2] https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs/programs/new-mobility-program/scooter-bike-share-data https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs... [3] https://www.engadget.com/ford-e-scooter-company-spin-leaving-markets-laying-off-staff-154545440.html https://www.engadget.com/ford-e-scooter-company-spin-leaving...
- nyanpasu64 3y agoI'm still upset that Raspberry Pi was focused on ensuring institutional customers (like these electric scooters) could order thousands of Pis, while leaving hobbyists trying to order single-digit quantities scrambling through years-long waiting lists and listings which get snapped up in seconds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_aL9V0JsQQ&t=564s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_aL9V0JsQQ&t=564s).
- post-it 3y agoI'd be shocked if there's a company in the world who would prioritize Joe Shmoe wanting to buy 1 widget over BigCorp wanting to buy 10 000. It's economics of scale.
- paulgb 3y agoThe Raspberry Pi Foundation is a registered charity to promote computer science education, so if any company were to prioritize Joe Shmoe it would be them.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThe foundation is a small part. The Pis are built and sold by a commercial company that even advertises Pis for industry use: https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/for-industry/
- calgarymicro 3y agoThe Foundation's charitable activities involve funding educational programs for children.[0] Those educational programs are funded via the profits made from selling Raspberry Pis[1], so their charitable goals are aided by selling as many Pis as possible; that's helped by ensuring that reliable corporate customers that place orders in the thousands are never left high and dry. [0]https://www.raspberrypi.com/about/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/about/ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
- 3y ago
- samtho 3y agoThis would be hilariously satirical if it were not true and it highlights much of what is wrong with tech. A benture capital subsidized micro mobility startup pulls out of a major city ostensibly because threshold for potential profit has been crossed and they’ve determined they cannot adjust their pricing to get the right numbers on their spreadsheet (note: this likely part of the reason why so many of these companies have trouble converting people to yearly plans, why bother if your market can be dropped with such swift indifference?). After pulling out of the market they leave their trash, that were assets a few days previous, scattered amongst the city as technological blight strewn across the landscape, left to rust. When opportunists go to crack them open, they find a raspberry pi, an SBC created for educational and hobby purposes but has been infamously out of stock because larger companies want to vacuum them all up to use in their own products. Then you wonder where all the engineering cost for these scooters went. After the presumably thousands of hours of labor that went into designing this, they went with a consumer grade, off the shelf product for an application that would have required a fraction of the power it was capable of? Not to mention that Spin can be identified as one of offenders of why the raspberry pi is so goddamn hard to find. This all makes me irrationally irritated.
- kierank 3y agoThis isn't the fault of RPi as such. It's the fault of the whole embedded industrial SBC industry whose boards are expensive, long lead time, have awful software and are poorly documented.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mschuster91 3y ago> After the presumably thousands of hours of labor that went into designing this, they went with a consumer grade, off the shelf product for an application that would have required a fraction of the power it was capable of? Driving the 3-phase motor yes, that can (and is usually) done with a dedicated real-time MCU/ASIC. But the interface with the backend, the actual brains? You need to deal with GPS, authentication (unlock via app/bluetooth/...), ride logging, debug data. And at that point an ESP32 or heaven forbid an Arduino won't cut it either, and you don't want to spend hundreds of hours on wrangling with some custom higher-power embedded board because that is real nasty to get right. So you use an RPi because the extremely broad user base has already solved every issue you might have run into. Besides, the innards of e-scooters can be had as whitelabel solutions, no one engineers these themselves. All people do is design the outer shell based on a design kit, do whatever needs to be done to pass legal certifications, and integrate some sort of brains if it's for a fleet.
- riffic 3y agoThis was a Ford subsidiary too.
- DropInIn 3y agoLooks like the same model as neuron which is have used and seen torn to bits by what I assumed were crack/meth heads.... but maybe it was just someone who wanted a free pi
- Gigachad 3y agoI once met a guy who cracked open scooters to take the sim card. They then had a 4G wifi router that they found an exploit to change the IMEI to match the scooter to create a wifi AP with unlimited internet not attached to their identity.
- asddubs 3y agoincidentally you can change the IMEI on a pinephone relatively easily, at least there's guides available online. I haven't tried it and apparently it's illegal, but the more you know
- brendamn 3y agoIs there a hardware platform better suited for these types of use cases? Not that long ago it seemed the tradeoff was either use a cheap but unreliable hobby platform (RPi or Arduino), or a stable but expensive (and usually somewhat custom) platform that involves picking the right components, board design, etc. Espressif sounds like they might be filling this gap, but it’s been a long time since I’ve looked seriously at any of this.
- talldatethrow 3y agoWait, so if I find one of these in SF I'm just allowed to take it? How do we know when they've been 'abandoned' locally?
- fnord77 3y ago[flagged]
- internetter 3y agoWoah, didn't know this. What was the intent? Why hasn't this been reversed? All I'm seeing online is people who think this is a bad idea, are there supporters?
- whoknowsidont 3y agoThis is a common trope and dishonest statement among certain political factions, there is no need to bring that here (or anywhere for that matter). Consider your words and positions carefully, they look like they could use some attention.
- fnord77 3y agoIt's not a common trope, it is a fact. All but the most serious crimes are currently being dismissed, either by the DA or by judges. And those were the ones where the police bothered to make arrests. There's an epidemic of property crime in SF and SFPD is doing nothing.
- fnord77 3y agoany tips on cracking the outer shell?
- dole 3y agoA thin step drill bit. I think this might have been an early dev security unit because all of the ones I saw had a much smaller single pcb and iirc was a third party all-in-one board or custom board sourced later. Also, this looks like an ES2 and Spin switched to ESMaxes early on.
- robbywashere_ 3y agoincoming flame war about how the raspi 4 was overpowered and they should have just used a button sized 8052, written the software in assembly and ran it all on CR3032 battery.
- Avamander 3y agoit's an absolutely valid point though
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoNo, it's not. Engineers figure out what to use based on availability, target Bill of Materials cost, schedule and performance needed. If the Pi hits those perfectly, then you use the pi. If not, use something else. In many cases, meeting a development schedule is far, far more important than cost or other constraints. I will happily throw a $25 ESP32 module at something that a $0.50 Atmel chip could handle, if I only need to build one unit. The $25 is a bargain compared to the amount of work I'd have to do to get the Atmel chip up and running.
- BasedAnon 3y agoaside from how high the labor cost for that would be
- sschueller 3y agoReminds me of the juicero. Over engineered to the max [1] to literally squeeze a bag of juice... [1] https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ
- whalesalad 3y agoThis is like shucking drives but shucking rare compute.
- butz 3y agoDoes this increase potential attack surface and make them more vulnerable to remote attacks? I wonder if anyone is pentesting electric scooters. It would be useful to have magic button to remotely reduce speed of a reckless scooter driver.
- guptaxpn 3y agoHas anyone found a .img dump of the micro SD? I'd be very curious to see what they were using these for.