- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Title says most of it. Spin electric scooters exited the Seattle market and abandoned their scooters all over the city and apparently they have a pi 4 in them!
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So that’s where all the damn Pi4s went.
Well, they sure as fuck didn’t go to the hobbyist market, we’ve been getting fucked by the rPi foundation for 3 years now.
Well, everyone wanting to buy anything with a proccessor in it, has been getting fucking these last 3 years
I mean, the cold reality is that they developed and released a perfect piece of hardware for industrial automation and sold it for pennies in comparison to other industrial computer boards.
Industry will always have deeper pockets than hobbyists.
They also bent over backwards to help industrial buyers get them while flat out refusing to help content creators and Devs of open source projects that use the pi - it was really disappointing tbh
Still love them though but not as much as I used to.
This is such a terrible application. These things would drain their battery just running the pi and electronics. Why such a high power platform for such basic functionality?
This screams of free money flooding startups. Amateur hour.
I’m not intimately familiar with the BCM2711 but I believe it’s a reasonable, albeit somewhat overpowered, processor for the application. It can be put into a variety of low power states and probably pulled out of sleep by various events like the GSM chip sending packets or accelerometer motion (frequently the peripheral chips have dedicated “wakeup” pins that you can wire to interrupts). It’s not the most cost effective option by far, there are sub $5 microcontrollers with multiple cores for handling communications and real time motor control concurrently but you’d need to hire someone like me for a few months @$200/hr to write the low level drivers and design the boards. The rpi lets random web-only devs fumble their way through hardware development using whatever GitHub Python libraries they can find. If you only need a hundred scooters it makes more sense to just yolo it and buy up the remaining supply of rpis to start your grift.
Great explanation. I’d be one of those web Devs.
But why not an ESP32 or something that’s really well supported but better matched to their use case? Rpi screams ‘I read an article on how to connect my leds to Wi-Fi once’ levels of competence.
But I suppose if it was a half baked grift of sorts then it checks out haha. Even if that grift was more of an egotistical and not intentionally sourced grift.
Yeah, that’s the issue ultimately. The ESP32 chips are nice and easy to use but still pale in comparison to getting things working on a pi for the average developer without embedded experience. These devs may not even know they exist to be completely honest.
It’s a lot cheaper than getting an EE to design you a more efficient bespoke solution.
Could just buy an ESP32 board instead, at least that doesn’t suck down power and need to boot Linux to function.
They probably could have used a Pico, certainly a zero instead of a 4
Wait, a company can just decide to abandon hundreds of their hardware in the middle the streets?
Privatized profits, socialized loses.
It’s not abandoned property unless the finder doesn’t know who it belongs to.
If the name of the company is on the scooter, it is mislaid property, not abandoned property.
The classic bar exam question on this involves the finder of a bag of money. In one hypothetical, it’s a plain canvas bag. In another, it has the name of a bank on the bag.
When the name is there, you have to give it back. The finder only gets to keep it if after legal notice and a waiting period, the owner fails to reclaim it. In most states there is a statute on this, and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.
When the fine for littering and the cost of repair or recycling is higher than what you can recoup from this sort of lost property, it’s a win win for the police.
What if the “bag of money” didn’t have any money in it at all, and the cost of recovering and properly disposing of the “bag of money” cost the legal owners more than what the bag and it’s contents are worth?
Oh, sure, it comes down to knowledge of the facts. If the owner manifests an intention not to recover it, then it is abandoned. But if you just find the scooter, or even if the company has said it’s going out of business, that’s not the same as having knowledge that the owner has no intent to retrieve the property.
Counterpoint: all of that is irrelevant if the legal owners don’t care enough to sue you.
I mean everything is legal unless someone enforces the contrary.
and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.
This is probably paranoid, but I always assumed that a cop would get his cousin to come in and claim it, or that the station would just keep it and then be like “oh yeah… yeah the owner claimed that 2 days before the expiration period”.
Official protocols aside; this is exactly what would happen lmao
Oh yeah, I don’t know firsthand but I’d bet it’s pretty common.
So are rentals scooters still popular in US cities or has that trend subsided? Last I heard people were getting fed up finding them everywhere, problems with vandals, etc.
Denver still has a ton of them. They’re still a huge logistics problem, but the city seems to be putting “protected” lanes in to help with scooters and bikes. Time will tell.
My city still has them. They’re pretty widely used, but I think we’re a good scenario for them. Our sidewalks aren’t cramped, we’re a very spread out city, and our public transit isn’t stellar.
They didn’t last where I live, but my mother lives in a town about an hour away (Bloomington, Indiana) which still has them, and they appear to be popular.
It’s a legitimate salvage.
Remember the Cant!
I am that guy
Edit: someone doesn’t know the best quote: https://youtu.be/4dn76ZPt_Y0
Let’s go shuck some scoots, boys!
Self-hosted scooter!
I swear they probably followed an instructables to found the startup…
Lime still seems to be doing business in Austin. Not sure about the other brands.
They’re somewhat popular in Milwaukee, WI too
