Raspberry pi 4 inside abandoned scooters
Raspberry Pis Found in Abandoned Spin Scooters in Seattle
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
“When there were”, implying you can find a pi4 in stock right now that isn’t from a scalper
Wait, a company can just decide to abandon hundreds of their hardware in the middle the streets?
Privatized profits, socialized loses.
Corporations be like:
🐰
👉👉
Companies can just dump shit wherever when they're done with it and have no responsibility to clean it up?
🌎👨🚀🔫👩🚀
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.
I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.
honestly, I would too. even though supplies are starting to bounce back (mainly in the USA, and I'm not in the USA), a free Pi is a free Pi. I generally can find uses for more pi's.....
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.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah the pricing only makes sense for occasional use, yet of course they market it for your daily commutes as well. It would cost me about 5€ to ride to work with those, another 5€ to ride back, which would total something like 100€ per month.
I just bought my own instead as, it's a fun, practical and cheap way to commute if you own your own. I can easily carry it with me to my apartment so it doesn't get stolen and costs next to nothing to use compared to a car.
Not living in a city with these scooters but in a country that has 10+ different virtual wallets services. I can tell you 101% it's all about the credit sit in the customers' accounts that obviously easy but not straightforward to pull out and stay there a long long time.
It was never about the "convenience" for anyone. It's the same scheme of holding people's credit.
Same in my smaller UK city. If you're a tourist, it's probably a decent idea. Might work in London or somewhere like that. But Nottingham? Who is going there to see the sights? There's only a slightly rubbish castle. Don't take long to see that. Most of the Robin Hood tat is up at Sherwood Forest, and you ain't taking a toy scooter to go and see that.
For a commuter, that scooter would be taken to their office, would sit outside all day, then they'd take it back. Just the regular 9 to 5 workday. That's not a sustainable business model. They'd need to be just in a really busy area, and in use all the time.
You can make more money with a flop than with a hit??
I hope to see the prison yard scooter industry taking investors soon.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yeah I saw a couple videos of people magnet fishing them out. The one amazingly still worked!
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!
That was my first thought, get a few of them and create yourself a scootermox cluster 😂
Can we just rip the software out and have a free electric scooter?
Can you just take apart abandoned things for parts in the states? Probably just have to be a white male and no problems?
What oppressed society do you live in where an item abandoned in the streets isn't fair game? Does your realm not know the law of "finders keepers"??
Back in the day when we used to be able to just leave our bikes anywhere around town and expect them to still be there, the one token black kid got accused by an adult I didn't know of stealing my essentially abandoned bike that I told him he could borrow and what it looked like and where I left it. That kinda just stuck with me for the rest of my life. It also clearly stuck with some of the other kids because a bunch of them kept saying shit about Tyrone stealing my bike and that wasn't even his name...
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
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.
Well, everyone wanting to buy anything with a proccessor in it, has been getting fucking these last 3 years