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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

#121

Post by xyzelement »

skelpmargyar wrote: post #101
xyzelement wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean obviously yes you can redesign and retool manufacturing if you really need to but it's not ideal and best to avoid.

Between "retool" and "hobbyist wait" one seems worse.

You may remember car manufacturers had to shut down assembly lines due to chip shortages in the last few years even for non-critical chips. Redesigning around missing components is non trivial though obviously doable

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

#122

Post by analog31 »

arcticbull wrote: post #97
Turskarama wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure but the added cost is not a big factor when you're making a handful of them.. If you're making tens of thousands though? Then it begins to add up.

10,000 @ $35 is $350,000 - that's really not that much money. That's like 1 to very generously 3 engineers for a year. Can you really design, build, validate, ramp, stock, fulfill and deploy your own hardware for less than that? I strongly suspect they ran the numbers and the answer was a hard no. Not to mention the time penalty - as a rule of thumb it takes about minimum 6m average 12m to go from concept to physical…

And then the designer up and quits, leaving you with a sketchy and gratuitously complex design that nobody can fathom.

A volume like 10k puts you in a dreaded "in between" zone. You're not making a one-off widget that a customer is willing to pay an unlimited amount for because it solves a unique problem. And it's not enough volume to make something that just rolls off an assembly line. All of the simplistic mental models for how to proceed, don't work.

I work in such an industry, making specialized equipment. Every component is an expensive buy-in. It's ridiculously hard to find cost savings every component is up against the same math. Then again the competition faces the same problem.

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

#123

Post by pcdoodle »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #93
ravenstine wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there so much of a shortage of hardware engineering talent that these startups really need to be using hobby hardware? I am not formally trained in electronics, but I managed to learn enough in the last year to design and manufacture my own PCBs for respiratory breath analysis with Atmel microprocessors. Essentially, they're like Arduinos but I also attached an off-the-shelf SD card reader and a bluetooth module.…

> I am not formally trained in electronics, but I managed to learn enough in the last year to design and manufacture my own PCBs How did you learn? I'm not formally trained in electronics either and would like to be able to do this.

I picked a somewhat easy project and paid an engineer I found online $20.00/hr over asking to do the design with me one on one over screen sharing in 2-3 hour increments. 2 weeks later a board was born.

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

#124

Post by zamadatix »

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.

I think all of the areas you listed have the same desire pushed on them. Maybe even more so than in software. Being able to universally seek products or services that are not cost optimized is an extremely rare opportunity. Most everyone grapples with scarcity of some type before they grapple with not having the most robust and well fit option every time.

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

#125

Post by sschueller »

robbywashere_ wrote: post #54

incoming 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.

Reminds me of the juicero. Over engineered to the max [1] to literally squeeze a bag of juice...

[1] https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ

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

#126

Post by xeckr »

notatoad wrote: post #45
xeckr wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>RPIs are out of stock because they're useful - this company found a use for them. While I sympathize with this sentiment, it should be noted that their use case could have been most likely accomplished with something like an ESP32, which is only slightly more difficult to work with but boasts a bulk price of $1-3 a pop. Using a Raspberry Pi 4 for this is a bit like flying a private jet to get to the grocery store.

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…

I understand your point—the barrier to entry for development is somewhat higher for the ESP32 than for the Raspberry Pi.

Then again, I wouldn't say that it is way more difficult, and I would wager that most of those who have the skills to build the brain of an electric scooter with a Pi 4 could learn how to port their application over to the ESP32 platform within at most a week. Even if you went with a more pessimistic estimate than that, the enormous price difference between the two boards will always make up for the cost of engineering at scale.

Consider a few other advantages of using the ESP32 here: faster replacement times of faulty hardware, and a way smaller attack surface. How much do you want to bet that those Pi 4s have "root" set as their username and password?

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

#127

Post by fnord77 »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #79
fnord77 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This 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.

It'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.

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

#128

Post by samtho »

mschuster91 wrote: post #15
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…

> 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…

BLDC drivers are readily available for a variety of applications and current levels. You need only a 3.3 or 5v signals to get them to run.

The RaspberryPi is not a real time computer, it uses a conventional OS that is inherently not real time. Regardless, you don’t need anything RealTime(tm) because the throttle produces a signal to the BLDC controller, and the MCU only turns on/enables its use.

The benefits from certification are minimal of using an off the shelf product, as you are still required to have the custom stuff l certified, too. They are likely using a cellular module that carry’s its own cert which is the biggest hurdle anyway.

My point is that using a hobby-grade Linux system designed for a much different use-case shows clear deficiency in the skillset of the team, management, or hiring, this is very obviously not the right tool for the job. What makes this upsetting is the fact that the market this was made for (and still is exerting demand pressure) cannot get their hands on it because of the pressures in the industry that values something that just works over correctness. If they would have used the Rpi compute modules, it would have given them a lot of flexibility in what they chose to include while reducing costs all around. This whole thing is a masterclass in gross incompetence characterized by waste and poor engineering.

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

#129

Post by samtho »

arcticbull wrote: post #30
hattmall wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not AT ALL the right tool for the job. And it shows that they don't even have one remotely competent hardware person on the team. Yes, it can work, but even at retail it's too expensive, requires too much power, and has a vastly higher rate of problems than many other off the shelf, far cheaper and much more widely available products.

> ... Yes, it can work, but even at retail it's too expensive ... Is it? $35 seems pretty cheap for an SBC that does what you need it to, with you having to do zero of the engineering work yourself. I think most industrial SBCs cost way more than $35. > ... requires too much power ... Pi 4 consumes 2-6W. [1] Scooter batteries are 400-600Wh based on a cursory glance, so we're talking up to two weeks of idle time. The…

With respect, your assumption here reads like a line from arrested development: “how much can a banana cost, $10?”

I really don’t think you have any idea of not the costs of these things, every penny counts with hardware products because any amount increases the marginal cost by at least 1.5x, vs software where it is so low it is effectively zero. I can get a very beefy STM32 for sub $10 at low quantities (sub $5 at > 1000) and toss all the passives and connectors needed for an extra $2-$4 the PCB may cost $1-$5, and you might be at $10-$15 depending on volume. You also can pre buy components that are known run out or design the board to accept different MCUs incase of shortages. With the RPi, you are totally SOL if you cannot find them, with your company being at the tail end of a, now, know volatile supply chain with a company you cannot get guaranteed fulfillment contracts with.

Your assumption about power is also very divorced from the reality of the situation, battery performance is not so easily calculated when your battery is not in clean room conditions, these scooters are subjected to extreme conditions and abuse, all of which can affect the battery. Additionally, It is disingenuous to consider only the operating parameters because it does run a full Linux system and software you load into it creates non-deterministic (at least with current models) situations where new software can skyrocket the power consumption. They also ideally have a separate battery from the drive motors so it can call for help and a tech can collect the scooter for maintenance.

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

#130

Post by majormajor »

post-it wrote: post #102
majormajor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

I'm doubtful that a copycat operation like Spin really ran the numbers as much as a much-higher-scale operation like Lime who clearly came to the "yes, we need custom shit" conclusion: https://flutterawesome.com/custom-iot-for-lime-gen-3-e-scoot...
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