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.
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.
It's far from industrial quality, but it still is getting used there. There's a reason it's a fraction of the cost of a proper PLC.
Yep, exactly.
If you can buy 10 Pis for the cost of one real PLC, and the only downtime you have if it fails is the time to swap the board and boot the machine back up it's a no-brainer solution.
I’ve been seeing them everywhere.
Those self service terminal at autozone? Pi’s.
It's not just that. If the Pi Foundation has to make a choice between fulfilling an order for 100 pis for a company so that the company can keep making products and meeting payroll vs. 100 hobbyists that want to make their own one-off project, which is the more moral use of resources?
Yeah, those companies should probably not have chosen a pi board to power their products but that's only noticeable in hindsight.
But how am I supposed to run pi-hole and connect my Insteon fan to HomeKit?
Well, everyone wanting to buy anything with a proccessor in it, has been getting fucking these last 3 years
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.
putting prototypes straight into production is the "tech startup" way!
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.
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.
Oh so that's why you can't buy them anymore, people are using them as microcontrollers.
Pis are pretty commonly used in industrial automation use cases (production lines, robot arms, etc) too. They're not the best thing for those use cases, but they're far cheaper than anything else, and anyone with basic programming knowledge can get something running on them, rather than having to find someone experienced with embedded systems (usually in C or C++).
When there were major supply chain issues, a lot of the limited supply was going towards those use cases, as the companies using them had already placed large orders very far in advance.
It wasn't just that they placed orders in advance. The pi foundation literally told people it was prioritizing those customers over anyone else. Kinda shitty IMO, considering the reason the pi was built in the first place.
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.
Wait, a company can just decide to abandon hundreds of their hardware in the middle the streets?
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.
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.
That’s all fine until they’re blocking sidewalks and access ways. Trying to push a stroller or wheelchair through the renta-scooter slalom course is horrible.
In my city, we have strict parking designated zones and you have to take a photo. If it's left on the sidewalk or road, it won't let you end the trip, implies it will fine you, plus they'll send someone to move it.
Them 'supposed to be everywhere' doesn't change that fact that they litter up the sidewalk and use the public areas of my town as a pseudo frontage for their business.
I have no problem with the bike systems that have docs for the bikes, it centralizes the locations and keeps the bike organized.
It's not ignorance, it's a full understanding that they pollute the public areas and already limited walkways in my city.
I guess that puts me in the 1%. I live in Richmond, VA. It’s a great city for scooters and on occasion I will rent one. That said, they really do literally litter the sidewalks. If I go for a run, I will 100% have to avoid scooters that have been improperly parked and are blocking the sidewalk. I feel bad for disabled people because sometimes the sidewalk is completely blocked for somebody in a wheelchair. There are too many of them for the demand. It can be quite annoying.
In my European city they're still popular but imho it's a grift to get money from investors with large pockets. I see brands popping out and go out of the market in 6 months. They just need to lose just the right amount of money in order to have the longest list of supported cities at the moment of raising capital. It's an application that's too expensive for every day use (1 euro unlock fee + 20 cents a minute in a city with a subway and extensive bus network???) but at the same time that ridiculous amount of money is clearly not enough to be sustainable. And they all use dark patterns. App forces you to register with email and sms verification just to see prices and you need to recharge credit that you might be never be able to use. Most they auto charge the credit card for 10 euro as soon as the credit goes under 5 euro.
Maybe the real money making activity is unusable credit in user accounts?
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.
I can't say anything about US cities, but they are all over the place in Canadian cities(or at least they are where I live)
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.
Can you just take apart abandoned things for parts in the states? Probably just have to be a white male and no problems?
Probably, who is gonna come after you? The company has decided it is too expensive to repossess them.
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