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.
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.
While I sympathize with this sentiment, it should be noted that their use case could have been most likely accomplished with something like an ESP32, which is only slightly more difficult to work with but boasts a bulk price of $1-3 a pop.
Using a Raspberry Pi 4 for this is a bit like flying a private jet to get to the grocery store.
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.
Why? ATMega board is surely a questionable fit, but ESP32, or nRF52, or some STM32 board with Bluetooth all should be fully capable of doing the basics. I can't imagine those scooters do some fancy signal processing on-board or handle some particularly heavy traffic. ESP32 is capable of wrapping and transmitting a decent video stream (and even do some basic detection while it's at it) - surely it's much more data than some route information and various on-board telemetry. GPS and cellular are just talking over some bus to a module (pretty much the same as with rPI4), Bluetooth is available and not resource-expensive at all. So is talking to whatever relays run or block the motors - I imagine that's probably just a bunch of GPIOs. All that remains is need for some RAM to store/buffer the traces (ESP32, or one can throw in some external storage) and a basic TLS and MQTT implementation (or whatever tech would make most sense there) for the command and status message queue.
And most importantly, average ESP32 energy consumption is way smaller than rPI4's (it's pretty hot even when it idles). While I understand that scooters have large batteries, it still matters.
The RaspberryPi is not a real time computer, it uses a conventional OS that is inherently not real time. Regardless, you don’t need anything RealTime(tm) because the throttle produces a signal to the BLDC controller, and the MCU only turns on/enables its use.
The benefits from certification are minimal of using an off the shelf product, as you are still required to have the custom stuff l certified, too. They are likely using a cellular module that carry’s its own cert which is the biggest hurdle anyway.
My point is that using a hobby-grade Linux system designed for a much different use-case shows clear deficiency in the skillset of the team, management, or hiring, this is very obviously not the right tool for the job. What makes this upsetting is the fact that the market this was made for (and still is exerting demand pressure) cannot get their hands on it because of the pressures in the industry that values something that just works over correctness. If they would have used the Rpi compute modules, it would have given them a lot of flexibility in what they chose to include while reducing costs all around. This whole thing is a masterclass in gross incompetence characterized by waste and poor engineering.
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!
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.
I'd wager most people go with a RTOS
using a very cheap off the shelf linux board with great software support is a completely reasonable choice for corporations, too
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?
Make-versus-buy decisions abound in product development. If you aren't a full stack electronics and firmware designer, then you have to manage the design project with its uncertainties, including schedule. A buy-in gets you moving right away, to address other project issues that require a prototype. You can always design it out later.
Dealing with complex chips often involves discovering bugs in the docs, and a second board spin to fix them. Then you'd better have a good scope and some real knowledge.
Despite its hobby orientation, the RPi is legit.
How did you learn? I'm not formally trained in electronics either and would like to be able to do this.
If I wasn't personally involved in building something I'd generally assume the engineers were reasonable people making reasonable decisions.
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.
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.
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?
Because making a lot of money is more satisfying than supporting education and hobbyists. —- ftfy
You should get a job at the New York Times
> This all makes me irrationally...
I can tell
I'm still looking for 3 pi zero 2s and trying to be fiscally responsible and not get scalped or further contributing to this mess but wow it's been way too long and it's maddening.
I'm not a company, but I've spent a ton of money on pis (including professionally). I was a big champion and supporter convincing everyone I knew to use them for their projects. Now I'm just mad and looking for any alternative I can find. I know I'm not the only one. How can this not have negative long term consequences??
I know they are just a business at the end of the day but I was all in for years. Rational or not I feel completely betrayed.
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.
I think the argument is that there shouldn't be a Pi at the core
In many cases, meeting a development schedule is far, far more important than cost or other constraints. I will happily throw a $25 ESP32 module at something that a $0.50 Atmel chip could handle, if I only need to build one unit. The $25 is a bargain compared to the amount of work I'd have to do to get the Atmel chip up and running.
That's what Spin didn't like - competition.[3] "Open permit markets are places where multiple scooter companies can run businesses, with no caps on fleet sizes. Bear (Spin CEO) said they "create an uncertain operating environment" with "race to the bottom pricing." Apparently, Spin gets double the revenue in (non-competitive markets) compared to locations with a free-for-all market.
Er, that's how capitalism is supposed to work. They can't handle a free market.
[1] https://dallascityhall.com/departments/transportation/Docume...
[2] https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs...
[3] https://www.engadget.com/ford-e-scooter-company-spin-leaving...
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.
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.
It’s cheaper to buy Pis and make your startup than it is to make something yourself, which is equal parts impressive and sad.
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.
