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 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.
> 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.
What a strange complaint. RPIs are out of stock because they're useful - this company found a use for them. Really the issue isn't one of who's buying, but rather an issue of the Foundation not making enough of their wildly successful product. Seems like a high-quality problem.
I can't imagine the Foundation being up in arms over someone finding a use for their product. The more users, the better the economy of scale, the cheaper the product is for everyone.
> Then you wonder where all the engineering cost for these scooters went.
Well, into the backend, the integration, the mechanical engineering - the myriad other things that mark the difference between a fun thing you made at home and a product you sell to the public.
> 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?
Again, economics of scale. One product that's more capable than any one person needs - but has a bigger audience - is likely cheaper than a niche one that's 'right-sized.'
Your remote control doesn't need a Cortex M0 but they're cheaper than an 8051 now.
> Not to mention that Spin can be identified as one of offenders of why the raspberry pi is so goddamn hard to find.
So can anyone who hit 'add to cart.' Especially since they only have like 500-1000 scooters per city in which they operate. That's not exactly Apple-scale orders.
> 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 (unlock via app/bluetooth/...), ride logging, debug data. And at that point an ESP32 or heaven forbid an Arduino won't cut it either, and you don't want to spend hundreds of hours on wrangling with some custom higher-power embedded board because that is real nasty to get right. So you use an RPi because the extremely broad user base has already solved every issue you might have run into.
Besides, the innards of e-scooters can be had as whitelabel solutions, no one engineers these themselves. All people do is design the outer shell based on a design kit, do whatever needs to be done to pass legal certifications, and integrate some sort of brains if it's for a fleet.
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!
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 never tried to launch an embedded Linux-powered product, because if you did you’d quickly realize that building custom images from obscure Linux and U-Boot forks is just not fun. Raspberry Pi solved that for everybody, this is why it’s popular among startups even though it’s not the best hardware around spec- and cost-wise.
if the RPi foundation didn't want commercial customers they wouldn't have them, it's not like these are being stolen from the hands of starving children
using a very cheap off the shelf linux board with great software support is a completely reasonable choice for corporations, too
This isn't the fault of RPi as such. It's the fault of the whole embedded industrial SBC industry whose boards are expensive, long lead time, have awful software and are poorly documented.
Is there so much of a shortage of hardware engineering talent that these startups really need to be using hobby hardware?
I am not formally trained in electronics, but I managed to learn enough in the last year to design and manufacture my own PCBs for respiratory breath analysis with Atmel microprocessors. Essentially, they're like Arduinos but I also attached an off-the-shelf SD card reader and a bluetooth module. After that experience, I learned enough that I can simply build virtually everything into the board itself if I were to try again (which I'm still sort of in the process of doing).
Point is, the fact they're just using Raspberry Pis tells me that they barely know what they're doing. No reason why they can't design their own hardware to do the same thing but consume way less energy. What else do they truly need other than a basic microcontroller and a GSM module? GPS maybe?
> 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.
Nothing in the source suggests these are “strewn across the landscape”. Your comment is basically made up outrage bait. I live in Seattle and walk a few miles a day and haven’t seen any abandoned Spin scooters.
You know, if I try to get into exactly what is wrong, the problem is way more about the entire world relying on a single proprietary design than anything else.
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.
Raspberry Pis are commercial products made by a commercial company. They were out of stock, I believe, because of suppliers issues.
Now, I would agree that a Rpi 4 in an e-scooter seems overkill but if they are small and cheap enough, and easy to work with then why would you go to the trouble of finding a less powerful solution?
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.
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 a supply.
Compared to that, my as a hobbyist having to be patient to get another pi is completely incosequential.
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.
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?
Legally, abandoned property (at least at common law, not sure about Washington state) is up for grabs. Claiming abandoned property is not looting and not only is there nothing wrong with it ethically or legally, it’s probably for the best that it is out to reasonable use.
Yeah, based on the other comments below I've revised the title. But if Spin left Seattle and didn't bother to properly clean up their scooters off the streets, it's fair game for anyone to pick up and dismantle what effectively is a lug of e-waste.
If anything the pis are the payment for disposing of the companies trash for them. They should be getting a fine for something like that, much less call it looting.
Is there a hardware platform better suited for these types of use cases?
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.
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
I once met a guy who cracked open scooters to take the sim card. They then had a 4G wifi router that they found an exploit to change the IMEI to match the scooter to create a wifi AP with unlimited internet not attached to their identity.
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...
I think this might have been an early dev security unit because all of the ones I saw had a much smaller single pcb and iirc was a third party all-in-one board or custom board sourced later. Also, this looks like an ES2 and Spin switched to ESMaxes early on.
samtho|2 years ago
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.
This all makes me irrationally irritated.
arcticbull|2 years ago
What a strange complaint. RPIs are out of stock because they're useful - this company found a use for them. Really the issue isn't one of who's buying, but rather an issue of the Foundation not making enough of their wildly successful product. Seems like a high-quality problem.
I can't imagine the Foundation being up in arms over someone finding a use for their product. The more users, the better the economy of scale, the cheaper the product is for everyone.
> Then you wonder where all the engineering cost for these scooters went.
Well, into the backend, the integration, the mechanical engineering - the myriad other things that mark the difference between a fun thing you made at home and a product you sell to the public.
> 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?
Again, economics of scale. One product that's more capable than any one person needs - but has a bigger audience - is likely cheaper than a niche one that's 'right-sized.'
Your remote control doesn't need a Cortex M0 but they're cheaper than an 8051 now.
> Not to mention that Spin can be identified as one of offenders of why the raspberry pi is so goddamn hard to find.
So can anyone who hit 'add to cart.' Especially since they only have like 500-1000 scooters per city in which they operate. That's not exactly Apple-scale orders.
The issue is supply, not demand.
mschuster91|2 years ago
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 (unlock via app/bluetooth/...), ride logging, debug data. And at that point an ESP32 or heaven forbid an Arduino won't cut it either, and you don't want to spend hundreds of hours on wrangling with some custom higher-power embedded board because that is real nasty to get right. So you use an RPi because the extremely broad user base has already solved every issue you might have run into.
Besides, the innards of e-scooters can be had as whitelabel solutions, no one engineers these themselves. All people do is design the outer shell based on a design kit, do whatever needs to be done to pass legal certifications, and integrate some sort of brains if it's for a fleet.
jrockway|2 years ago
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!
fellowmartian|2 years ago
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 never tried to launch an embedded Linux-powered product, because if you did you’d quickly realize that building custom images from obscure Linux and U-Boot forks is just not fun. Raspberry Pi solved that for everybody, this is why it’s popular among startups even though it’s not the best hardware around spec- and cost-wise.
amelius|2 years ago
Palomides|2 years ago
using a very cheap off the shelf linux board with great software support is a completely reasonable choice for corporations, too
kierank|2 years ago
ravenstine|2 years ago
I am not formally trained in electronics, but I managed to learn enough in the last year to design and manufacture my own PCBs for respiratory breath analysis with Atmel microprocessors. Essentially, they're like Arduinos but I also attached an off-the-shelf SD card reader and a bluetooth module. After that experience, I learned enough that I can simply build virtually everything into the board itself if I were to try again (which I'm still sort of in the process of doing).
Point is, the fact they're just using Raspberry Pis tells me that they barely know what they're doing. No reason why they can't design their own hardware to do the same thing but consume way less energy. What else do they truly need other than a basic microcontroller and a GSM module? GPS maybe?
ahupp|2 years ago
If I wasn't personally involved in building something I'd generally assume the engineers were reasonable people making reasonable decisions.
seizethecheese|2 years ago
Nothing in the source suggests these are “strewn across the landscape”. Your comment is basically made up outrage bait. I live in Seattle and walk a few miles a day and haven’t seen any abandoned Spin scooters.
marcosdumay|2 years ago
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.
mytailorisrich|2 years ago
Now, I would agree that a Rpi 4 in an e-scooter seems overkill but if they are small and cheap enough, and easy to work with then why would you go to the trouble of finding a less powerful solution?
znpy|2 years ago
Because making a lot of money is more satisfying than supporting education and hobbyists. —- ftfy
WhereIsTheTruth|2 years ago
mcdonje|2 years ago
aaron695|2 years ago
[deleted]
brigadier132|2 years ago
You should get a job at the New York Times
> This all makes me irrationally...
I can tell
nyanpasu64|2 years ago
post-it|2 years ago
xyzelement|2 years ago
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 a supply.
Compared to that, my as a hobbyist having to be patient to get another pi is completely incosequential.
ugh123|2 years ago
robbywashere_|2 years ago
sschueller|2 years ago
[1] https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ
Avamander|2 years ago
Animats|2 years ago
paulcole|2 years ago
mhb|2 years ago
constantly|2 years ago
atsushin|2 years ago
cbarrick|2 years ago
They responsibly and quickly gathered up (almost) all of the scooters in one weekend.
Maybe 0.1% of the scooters remain, likely due to the battery being dead and tracking being difficult.
So in my experience, I believe they are acting in good faith when exiting a city.
thatguy0900|2 years ago
brendamn|2 years ago
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.
5ADBEEF|2 years ago
whalesalad|2 years ago
tekeous|2 years ago
It’s cheaper to buy Pis and make your startup than it is to make something yourself, which is equal parts impressive and sad.
butz|2 years ago
DropInIn|2 years ago
Gigachad|2 years ago
RIMR|2 years ago
atsushin|2 years ago
talldatethrow|2 years ago
fnord77|2 years ago
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guptaxpn|2 years ago
riffic|2 years ago
jacquesm|2 years ago
fnord77|2 years ago
dole|2 years ago
I think this might have been an early dev security unit because all of the ones I saw had a much smaller single pcb and iirc was a third party all-in-one board or custom board sourced later. Also, this looks like an ES2 and Spin switched to ESMaxes early on.