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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

#31

Post by mschuster91 »

majormajor wrote: post #20
mschuster91 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

e-scooters are usually classified as vehicles. Stealing them in an organized fashion to part them out can net you a GTA charge.

Besides, why would you want to steal them? You can grab new ones for a couple hundred dollars. Not worth the risk.

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

#33

Post by majormajor »

mschuster91 wrote: post #31
majormajor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

e-scooters are usually classified as vehicles. Stealing them in an organized fashion to part them out can net you a GTA charge. Besides, why would you want to steal them? You can grab new ones for a couple hundred dollars. Not worth the risk.

https://scootertalk.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=962&start=40

This was already all over the internet 4 years ago when Lime/Bird got started and were using off the shelf vehicles.

AFAIK, somehow going after scooter thefts in cities that often already had a grumpy relationship with them for GTA never really happened. And come on, there's a LOT of people for whom "a couple hundred dollars" is a plenty big enough score. Why would anyone steal a bike in that case either?

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

#34

Post by paulgb »

post-it wrote: post #28
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 ).

I'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.

The 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.

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

#35

Post by mcdonje »

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…

Seems like your irritation is actually pretty rational.

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

#36

Post by jrockway »

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…

I dunno. I think you have to build a lot of units before the NRE cost increase beats the BOM cost decrease. Anyone that knows Python can write software that runs on a Raspberry Pi. Getting someone who knows embedded systems is going to cost you a lot more than that. Let's say you pay your Python engineer $200k a year and your embedded systems expert $350k a year. By hiring the Python engineer instead of the embedded systems engineer, you now have $150k to spend on parts. A Raspberry Pi 4 is $35, and a RP2040 (probably waaaaaay more compute power than these things need) is $1. So you save $34 per scooter, maximum. $150k/$34 = 4411 scooters before you break even by optimizing BOM costs. Do they have that many V1 scooters? Probably not.

Another angle is paying contractors. I doubt that you need a person-year to make an electric scooter, so that pushes the break-even point down a few units. But, your Python engineer can also make the backend when you're done with the hardware. It really depends on how expensive your recuriting/hiring/onboarding pipeline is. I am sure many people you run into will say that they know how to design e-scooter control systems, but you have to find the ones who are not lying. That's a cost.

So all in all, it seems like they spent their investors money wisely. You do the cost reduction when you want to expand, not for the "yeah, this business can't work" test phase. It seems like that's what they did; the business doesn't work in Seattle at any scooter BOM cost, so it's not a business.

The dumb part is not paying someone to round up the scooters and eBay the electronics and batteries, though. They could easily make a lot of their money back, probably even selling the used Pis for more than they paid!

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

#37

Post by simfree »

mschuster91 wrote: post #31
majormajor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

e-scooters are usually classified as vehicles. Stealing them in an organized fashion to part them out can net you a GTA charge. Besides, why would you want to steal them? You can grab new ones for a couple hundred dollars. Not worth the risk.

eBikes certainly aren't classed as vehicles in the US, and no one cares when they are stolen.

Given how little prosecution there is around bike theft, I doubt any police department or prosecutor is interested in spending the resources to prosecute the theft of an even cheaper mobility device.

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

#38

Post by chasd00 »

hattmall wrote: post #25
amelius wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

The thing about the Pi is, since it runs an actual Linux os, you can take garden variety web devs and have them write code for it. You don’t need any esoteric hardware devs to fiddle all day with bits and writing drivers before they even start on the actual use case. That alone makes the Pi super attractive for startups.

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

#39

Post by majormajor »

post-it wrote: post #23
majormajor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 seem like a great endorsement to me.

You have to spend $$$ up front on thousands of vehicles that cost hundreds of dollars each, and your marginal revenue per ride ain't great. Putting a dent in your vehicle theft rate becomes a big deal fast.

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