81–90 of 145 posts
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 ).
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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.
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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.
The Foundation's charitable activities involve funding educational programs for children.[0] Those educational programs are funded via the profits made from selling Raspberry Pis[1], so their charitable goals are aided by selling as many Pis as possible; that's helped by ensuring that reliable corporate customers that place orders in the thousands are never left high and dry. [0] https://www.raspberrypi.com/about/ [1…
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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…
> In the past few years they've designed a new hardware item with a Pi at the core. I think the argument is that there shouldn't be a Pi at the core
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There’s nothing wrong with this, RPi is a great platform for hardware startups because it’s one of the very few platforms with a good, well-documented Linux distro, a million HATs for easy prototyping, and a community to help you out. It was never meant just for education and hobbyists, Raspberry Pi Foundation absolutely supports the commercial use case, and their newer products like CM4 even more so. I’d wager you n…
> I’d wager you never tried to launch an embedded Linux-powered product I'd wager most people go with a RTOS
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> 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…
> 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 Why? ATMega board is surely a questionable fit, but ESP32, or nRF52, or some STM32 board with Bluetooth all should be fully capable of doing the basics. I can't imagine those scooters do some fancy signal processing on-board or handle some particularly heavy traffi…
I've shipped ESP32-based boards and written firmware for it that really tries to cram in as many features as possible, but you do hit limits. While I almost certainly wouldn't make the choice of shipping a high-volume product with an actual Raspberry Pi in it, I do see why trying to cram all of this into an MCU is tough — especially if you're trying to get to market quickly.
Perhaps this would have been a good place to use the RPi CM4 though?
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…
The availability of something everybody uses is entirely up to Broadcom right now. The pi foundation fixed the problem on the 2040, and maybe they will fix on the mainline some day, but the situation isn't optimal right now.
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 I wasn't personally involved in building something I'd generally assume the engineers were reasonable people making reasonable decisions.
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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…
Where do you live that embedded systems folks cost more than a generic Python dev? Everywhere I've ever heard of, ES is on the low end of the pay scale for software. Python is usually in the middle somewhere. That's definitely true in Seattle as well.