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E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters

abolish.social

11–20 of 145 posts

Re: E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters

#11
post #3

So 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?

Yeah, 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.

Re: E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters

#12
This 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.

Re: E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters

#14
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally, 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.

Yes, so are they abandoning them, or plan to pick them up and use them somewhere else?

I 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.

Re: E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters

#15
post #12

This 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 compani…

> 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.

Re: E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters

#16
post #12

This 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 compani…

Perhaps they just used the Pi to reduce the time to market. I don't see what's wrong with that.

Re: E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters

#18
post #3

So 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?

If 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.

Well, 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.

Re: E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters

#19
post #12

This 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 compani…

if the RPi foundation didn't want commercial customers they wouldn't have them, it's not like these are being stolen from the hands of starving children

using a very cheap off the shelf linux board with great software support is a completely reasonable choice for corporations, too

Re: E-scooter startup Spin apparently uses RasPi 4s inside their scooters

#20
post #12

This 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 compani…

> 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…

Sounds like a good way to make your hardware easy to steal.
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