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Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

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Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#331

Post by tormeh »

086421357909764 wrote: post #51
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NUCs are surprisingly well-built little machines. I have one in my car, and I give them my absolute seal of approval. I've heard of people running little VMware clusters on them too.

It's actually suprising that people think they're not "normal" computers. I provisioned a few of them and they're little beasts. Most in use are I7, 16-32gb ram, Dual NVME. The Skulltrail nucs are extremely powerfull and on the lower end the atom based units are solid too. I also ran a nuc in my car for a while, mostly stumbling radio / wifi spectrum as I drove around, but it was perfect with its relatively low power…

But is it real, 6-core 3GHz+ i7? Or is it this mobile crap Intel has been pushing lately?

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#332

Post by donkeyd »

burgreblast wrote: post #297
raiflip wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy efficient. When you walk in someone with a tablet takes your order, and by the time you get to the cash register your food is ready. Works so well because the employees are able to catch customers at the end of the line.

Here's "Line busting" the drive thru 68+ cars deep. It's astonishing the WiFi goes out that far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIQWyYQ0EYg FWIW, also an edge approach, with Prometheus etc.

Slightly off-topic, but what's the reason that Americans all tend to line-up at the drive thru? I was in LA, there was a huge line at the drive thru, so we parked, went inside and got our orders really quickly.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#333

Post by always_good »

donkeyd wrote: post #332
burgreblast wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's "Line busting" the drive thru 68+ cars deep. It's astonishing the WiFi goes out that far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIQWyYQ0EYg FWIW, also an edge approach, with Prometheus etc.

Slightly off-topic, but what's the reason that Americans all tend to line-up at the drive thru? I was in LA, there was a huge line at the drive thru, so we parked, went inside and got our orders really quickly.

The comfort of still being in your own space. For example, listening to your own music, no excursion for your kids to belabor, precisely don't have to park and get out.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#334

Post by rb666 »

uncreativebrian wrote: post #290
jedberg wrote: post #208

Sure, they have the biggest cloud in the US, but it's down on Sundays. Kidding aside, do you guys do maintenance on Sundays or is that forbidden by company policy?

This is Brian -- I wrote the article. We are closed on Sunday but its not dogmatic in nature. We want to make sure that everyone at Chick-fil-A has a great work/life balance. Occasionally we need to do some work on a Sunday but we try to architect and engineer in a manner that supports business-hours-friendly deployments, or scheduled deployments over night to protect that. This is truly a first-class design consider…

Just don't bring up your gay cousin.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#335

Post by ceejayoz »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #221
thomasdelteil wrote: post #49

On a related note, Chick-fil-A using Deep Learning models for object detection with MXNet to track how long fries have been waiting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Uuq_cX8b1M

This seems like such an over-engineered solution. It would've been much simpler to have a plate with multiple pressure sensors and a multi-color LED per spot. When you set the fries down on the sensor it activates and the LED turns green. After X amount of time the LED can turn yellow, meaning that it's becoming stale. Finally, after X+N time has passed and it's no longer fresh it can turn red. Removing the fries tur…

The computer-vision based version means you just take the first fry off the rack. Yours means the employee needs to assess the LEDs each time (which may only take a second, but is repeated hundreds if not thousands of times a day), reach more for the yellow one in the back, etc. That's a lot more sensors to break down than a single camera, too.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#336

Post by Corrado »

reaperducer wrote: post #129
timdorr wrote: post #3

If you want to see the actual hardware used at the restaurant, check out the previous blog post: https://medium.com/@cfatechblog/bare-metal-k8s-clustering-at... Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs.

Spoiler: It's a stack of Intel NUCs. Funny how the world has changed. I got my first taste of real computing from a guy in the next town who would buy dead PDP's from local McDonald's restaurants, fix them up, and sell them on. He always said the hardest part wasn't replacing broken parts, it was that invariably the machines would always have soda spilled in them, no matter where they were stored. Cleaning the inside…

I used to work in a hospital and the worst problem was keyboards full of blood. I would rather clean up soda all day long. :)

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#337

Post by Fellshard »

laurentl wrote: post #329
Fellshard wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be amazed how much satisfaction you can get out of learning to keep a steady stream of perfectly-crispy fries going. It's quite fun on a busy day - hectic, but strategic, and rewarding when you can stay on top of things _and_ produce minimal waste in the process. In some sense, the automation of demand prediction takes some of the fun out of gaining that intuition yourself. On the other hand, it is nice not to…

Okay, looking at it as the computer helping you stay in the flow is certainly a different perspective.

It might be looking back on my time in fast food with a slightly more romanticized lens than most would probably give it. :)

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#339

Post by JustSomeNobody »

behringer wrote: post #313
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This person[0] seems to have found a way of engaging the CEO in dialog. I, personally, think this is the best way of discussing differences. [0] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/shane-l-windmeyer/dan-cathy-c...

We also have an open dialog with Kim Jong-un; doesn't mean we should applaud the people that work and support him or feel sorry for those workers. They're traitors to the human race, in just the same way that Chick-Fil-A workers are directly responsible for what the company does.

Really? You're equating the "workers" of CFA to Kim Jong-un?

Nothing changes with attitudes like that.

Re: Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

#340

Post by dbrueck »

hogu wrote: post #316
dbrueck wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, in what way is Chick-fil-a not open-minded?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/03/19/chick-f... Anti gay marriage

I understand that you disagree with the CEO, but how do you get from there to the conclusion that he is not open-minded?
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