This would be hilariously satirical if it were not true and it highlights much of what is wrong with tech.<p>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 companies have trouble converting people to yearly plans, why bother if your market can be dropped with such swift indifference?). After pulling out of the market they leave their trash, that were assets a few days previous, scattered amongst the city as technological blight strewn across the landscape, left to rust. When opportunists go to crack them open, they find a raspberry pi, an SBC created for educational and hobby purposes but has been infamously out of stock because larger companies want to vacuum them all up to use in their own products. Then you wonder where all the engineering cost for these scooters went. 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? Not to mention that Spin can be identified as one of offenders of why the raspberry pi is so goddamn hard to find.<p>This all makes me irrationally irritated.
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 (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_aL9V0JsQQ&t=564s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_aL9V0JsQQ&t=564s</a>).
<i>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.</i>
So Spin is abandoning the scooters or their leaving is justification for looting? Also, if people are looting, isn't the more desirable thing the scooter?
Is there a hardware platform better suited for these types of use cases?<p>Not that long ago it seemed the tradeoff was either use a cheap but unreliable hobby platform (RPi or Arduino), or a stable but expensive (and usually somewhat custom) platform that involves picking the right components, board design, etc. Espressif sounds like they might be filling this gap, but it’s been a long time since I’ve looked seriously at any of this.
The robot delivery units from Starship Robotics are also largely off the shelf components including a Raspberry Pi and 4G hotspot.<p>It’s cheaper to buy Pis and make your startup than it is to make something yourself, which is equal parts impressive and sad.
Does this increase potential attack surface and make them more vulnerable to remote attacks? I wonder if anyone is pentesting electric scooters. It would be useful to have magic button to remotely reduce speed of a reckless scooter driver.
Looks like the same model as neuron which is have used and seen torn to bits by what I assumed were crack/meth heads.... but maybe it was just someone who wanted a free pi
This is just a shitpost as far as I can tell. Spin left Seattle a long time ago, so if you happen to find a scooter somehow, I guess there's a RPi4 in it...