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!
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.
I was working with a buddy on a “startup” that was more of a hobby than anything (and didn’t go anywhere). The early prototypes were controlled by Arduino and Pis early on – ease of software development was key as we experimented with and dialed in the hardware. The later prototypes used an ESP32 though, because we’re aren’t idiots.
I’m a hobbyist at best: it kills me that there are well paid “professional embedded software engineers” out there that can’t work with actual embedded hardware. All I could think of was this article on electrical engineers that can’t solder. The complete lack of real world, hands on experience with the hardware blows my mind.
Yup. This is really the worst part. I am a village idiot. So if i do it at home that’s fine.
But then again the shit I see at work sometimes…
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
Surely the drive motors use far more energy than the computer, and the computer doesn’t need to be fully powered on all the time.
Yeah they do. The device current issue is one of time. If they coded it properly they could keep the pi asleep at almost all times, but seeing as they used one in the first place I have my doubts.
Essentially it would make the scooter drain from just sitting vs being able to sit for weeks until a rider hops on.
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.
Wait, a company can just decide to abandon hundreds of their hardware in the middle the streets?
Privatized profits, socialized loses.
Companies can just dump shit wherever when they’re done with it and have no responsibility to clean it up?
🌎👨🚀🔫👩🚀
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.
lots of people throw them in the river
Which is incredibly gross. Stealing components from them is at least practical, but destroying them for funsies is equal parts childish and wasteful and not to mention dangerous. No one needs additional garbage to fish out of the water.
Shouldn’t leave them on the sidewalk then
That’s gross, and so are you.
Whatever, get your trash off the sidewalk
They take up way less space than what’s allocated for cars. But because it appears different you’ll not notice that the car parking takes away so much space that could be allocated to e.g. a wider sidewalk, dedicated bike lines, more green, or parking for more space efficient methods of transport such as rental scooters.
I’m against car parking on streets too, that doesn’t mean random companies should get to dump their product anywhere they want on the sidewalks.
How is trash in the river better?
Yeah I saw a couple videos of people magnet fishing them out. The one amazingly still worked!
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.
I live in a major US city, and yes they are still everywhere and being used. Here they have an actual use since walkability isn’t the best, and at worse are just a nuisance with the way they block parts of the sidewalk and can be left anywhere with little consequence.
They took them out of my small town, mostly due to the company (I think it was Bird in our area) not picking them up for weeks on end.
I’m personally glad they’re gone, too many douche canoes leaving them in the handicapped parking spots and on the walking trails. Finally had to lodge a complaint with the company when we found a bunch of them in front of the ER at my workplace…not like we have people who have mobility issues going in there or anything.
My city still has them. They get picked up every night and put at whatever corners or lots they gather them to.
Honestly in my experience anyone that’s complained about them has no idea at all what they do or how they work, so anyone “fed up finding them everywhere” is simply ignorant 99% of the time. They’re supposed to be everywhere lol that’s the entire point.
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
