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

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

#101

Post by skelpmargyar »

xyzelement wrote: post #47
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #6

I'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 ).

A bit of a first hand experience - my father in law runs a small manufacturing firm in the US. In the past few years they've designed a new hardware item with a Pi at the core. When the supply issues happened, they were concerned about not being able to manufacture the devices. That's a multi million dollar investment at stake not to mention the employees and customers that would be impacted. Luckily they figure out…

If they have a multi million dollar investment at stake and they're not able to pivot to any of the other many SBCs out there then they might just be incompetent. The Pi has nothing particularly special about other than it's well documented and cheap.

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

#102

Post by post-it »

majormajor wrote: post #39
post-it wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a 20 kg scooter, of course it's easy to steal.

A halfway-competent operation management team would see that as a reason to make the hardware harder to repurpose, not easier. Big organized operations can figure shit out, but put some barriers in front of the script-kiddie/homeless-dude contingent. A me-too copycat startup like Spin who got kicked out of Seattle a year ago ( https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2022/05/13/city-announces-ne... ) doing it this way doesn't…

A halfway-competent operation management team would run the numbers to see if there are enough people stealing scooters and stripping them for parts to justify developing proprietary hardware. They probably did and the answer was probably "no."

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

#103

Post by AlotOfReading »

internetter wrote: post #100
AlotOfReading wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside a few open source options like zephyr (and FreeRTOS to a lesser extent), RTOSes typically have a worse developer experience than even the shittiest vendor kernel trees. At least Linux doesn't dictate your choice of dev tools like most of the commercial RTOSes do and the libc usually works.

I quite like Zephyr? Are you saying it's somehow worse than Linux? I agree there's plenty of garbage though.

The opposite. Zephyr is one of the more ergonomic RTOSes. Compare that experience to what's offered by VxWorks or Green Hills, which feel like taking a time machine back to the early 2000s in terms of productivity and features.

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

#104

Post by internetter »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #103
internetter wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite like Zephyr? Are you saying it's somehow worse than Linux? I agree there's plenty of garbage though.

The opposite. Zephyr is one of the more ergonomic RTOSes. Compare that experience to what's offered by VxWorks or Green Hills, which feel like taking a time machine back to the early 2000s in terms of productivity and features.

Thank god I've been privileged to not be forced into using commercial RTOSes

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

#105

Post by Animats »

paulcole wrote: post #26
Animats wrote: post #5

What, they weren't required to collect them up and dispose of them properly?

Nobody’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.

Dockless 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/Docume...

[2] https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...

[3] https://www.engadget.com/ford-e-scooter-company-spin-leaving...

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

#106

Post by squarefoot »

amelius wrote: post #16
samtho wrote: 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.

Bad engineering (way overpowered board for the job), bad research (plenty of cheaper similar boards that do the same thing), bad economics as they chose the only supplier that doesn't sell bare chips, so that developing a cheaper personalized board is not doable. It was the wrong tool for the job since the beginning, and now it's also the overpriced nearly unobtanium link that inflates their production costs and can could bringthe product to an end..

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

#107

Post by squeaky-clean »

adolph wrote: post #50
notatoad wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

developing for esp32 is way more difficult than developing for raspi. raspi lets you basically treat it like a normal computer, you can use standard python and sqlite and install whatever nonsense you want from pip and basically assume it will run whatever your laptop can. it means you can hire kids straight out of school, or outsource to india, and whoever you get can work on it without really any concern - it'll ru…

You would like Python and SQLite on ESP32? Looks like a solved problem. https://github.com/spatialdude/usqlite/wiki/esp32

Micropython isn't actually Python.

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

#109

Post by mytailorisrich »

samtho wrote: 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…

Raspberry Pis are commercial products made by a commercial company. They were out of stock, I believe, because of suppliers issues.

Now, I would agree that a Rpi 4 in an e-scooter seems overkill but if they are small and cheap enough, and easy to work with then why would you go to the trouble of finding a less powerful solution?

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

#110

Post by cinntaile »

superdisk wrote: post #99
arcticbull wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've struggled with this question myself so I'll just put it out: what makes using something that's more powerful than you need - and less expensive - wrong or shameful? The only product that matters to a customer is one that exists, and if this approach saves you money, lets you prove product market fit, or allows the product to keep existing longer - isn't that more important than the fact the Pi has more parts tha…

My lament is more about the unrelenting desire to degrade software from being robust, well designed, and fit for the task, to fungible slop pouring out of a pipe from whoever is cheapest. In no other profession (architecture, construction, teaching, anything) would that mentality be tolerated. The unnecessarily wasteful hardware is just one of the (ultimately more benign) side effects of that.

> In no other profession (architecture, construction, teaching, anything) would that mentality be tolerated.

This is exactly what happens in other industries as well, it is not a software only problem.

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