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Facebook Gizmo
- lowiqengineer 6y agoI saw these during my onsite. I’m surprised they weren’t known externally...
- pmiller2 6y agoI’d guess they are known outside FB, just that a fancy terminal / conference room system isn’t very exciting.
- kristopolous 6y agoThis sounds like a common and generic enough business requirement. Isn't there something off the shelf that they could have used instead?
- quineoa 6y agoThere’s a lot. Cisco makes them if you have their conference room hardware. Any new tech corporate office (and some non tech) will have some sort of hardware that lets you dial into the meeting and or reserve the conference room.
- ufmace 6y agoIn my experience, most of the off the shelf systems for stuff like this doesn't work very well. Even when it does, it's not extensible. I could see it being appealing to have a more customizable in-house system, at least when you have as much engineering talent as Facebook probably does.
- TaylorAlexander 6y agoAlso when you want to train your in house engineering to make hardware, good to produce something internal and dog food it.
- whoisjuan 6y agoThere are many reasons why Facebook could prefer going with homegrown hardware: 1) It allows them to actually work with hardware and cross pollinate knowledge to their consumer hardware businesses. And I’m not talking only about the hardware itself but all the institutional knowledge required to negotiate with vendors, outsource circuit design and procure parts. 2) They can create one device that is multi-purpose like this one and control every low level detail so it can be used even for security critical tasks. 3) They can test the devices against their own infrastructure and collect low level data that is useful for developing video/voice services and encrypted services in real case scenarios. In general it just makes sense. Facebook’s market cap is 6X larger than Cisco and it employs 50k people. At that scale and for a company like FB, this doesn’t sound crazy.
- pmiller2 6y agoUnless I’m missing something, none of those reasons sound terribly compelling to me, given we’re talking about a social media company. Facebook is fundamentally not a hardware company, things like Oculus notwithstanding.
- alrs 6y agoThere's some projection-psychodrama to it, but it goes along with the tape on Zuckerberg's webcam: they really don't want Google, Amazon, or their Chinese competitors on their corporate network, especially not with cameras and microphones.
- whoisjuan 6y agoNot a hardware company yet. There was a time where Amazon and Google were not hardware companies. But I think saying they are not a hardware company is a bit unfair. Oculus by itself is a tremendously hard and complex hardware business. Portal less so, but it’s still a meaningful device with a lot of complexity. Also Facebook infrastructure must have hundreds of proprietary hardware elements that are built specifically for their own use cases. But I get what you’re saying. From all the tech behemoths, FB is the by far the least experienced in hardware. But I think it’s pretty clear that FB sees hardware as a column of their long term vision. That alone is enough reason to invest on developing your own hardware.
- mdriley 6y agoSure, it's easy enough to find network-attached screens. The hard part is giving those screens access to anything without them showing up as vectors for every Red Team exercise. Gizmos are used for basically any screen at Facebook that needs to display "live" information -- conference rooms, building maps, monitoring dashboards, etc. Each one has a provisioned identity protected by secure boot and hardware root of trust. They have a minimum of onboard storage (maybe even nothing mutable/persistent after boot?) so they're not a foothold for persistence.
- rkachowski 6y agoSo they're essentially Facebook's internal raspberry pi with a ton of accessories + focus on not becoming security nightmares?
- temikus 6y agoSure, but it’s either too expensive (Cisco), too unreliable (MIMO) or both (Tandberg). Source: used to be a Service Desk tech for a giant conglomerate.
- jumelles 6y agoLooks like people are saying this is used internally at Facebook. Is there any proof of this?
- nrp 6y agoIf you don’t trust the various folks who work, have interviewed at, or have had meetings at Facebook, there’s also this New York Times article that happens to have a photo of one front and center: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/technology/facebook-election-war-room.amp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/19/technology/facebook-elect...
- jumelles 6y agoThanks! All I was hoping for was a source just like that, rather than random comments on the internet.
- pvg 6y agoIt strikes me as unlikely foone would fake a box with 'facebook gizmo' printed on it and then make up some easily-refutable story about it.
- jameslk 6y agoUnfortunately this thing is not as interesting as it sounds. This is basically a programmable terminal that is used throughout Facebook's campus. For example, they're in meeting rooms to dial other meeting rooms for video conferences or to tell people to get out of meeting rooms because their meeting time is up. If you've ever been to a Facebook office, this is actually one of the first things you'll see, since you'll be signing an NDA on it shortly thereafter to enter the office building. It's packaged the way it is because employees can order them to hack on them. Presumably to encourage making more mundane office fixtures.
- Izkata 6y agoAmong the replies: > There's something amazing about it just being called Gizmo > Like, what could go wrong? (For anyone who doesn't recognize it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremlins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremlins )
- dejawu 6y agoBefore I even opened the link, I just knew it was going to be Foone.
- pmiller2 6y agoWhy? Is this Foone known for playing with random hardware and posting about it on Twitter? Edit: misplaced edit lol.
- MereInterest 6y agoYup. Example from a few weeks ago, modding a pregnancy test to run Doom. https://twitter.com/foone/status/1302820468819288066 https://twitter.com/foone/status/1302820468819288066
- pmiller2 6y agoI'm not sure what it says about me, but I wanted to make a joke about a pregnancy test running Doom, and all I could come up with is "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!" and "cool, but does it run Crysis?"
- rkachowski 6y agoBasically, that is 100% what they are known for. Foone has a lot of incredibly interesting posts on twitter around taking things apart and explaining the function.
- rachelbythebay 6y agoGoogle had the radishes, Facebook had the gizmos, and this is just one of those. This is in addition to countless other things used over the years at both places. (Sheets of paper in clear holders, Android tablets rigged to do PoE, you name it.) The radishes were neat since they managed to do what they did from whatever power they could scrape from their solar cells. This is impressive when you consider they were indoors! They also had some 802.15 type thing going on, albeit with funky little boxes scattered throughout doing gateway work. I was disappointed when that project was discontinued before it got very far.
- pmiller2 6y ago> Android tablets rigged to do PoE.... From the other comments here, it looks like this thing is basically the equivalent of the iPads we have running Envoy outside every conference room at my company. We weren’t nearly so clever. Our setup just has an ordinary Lightning cable going to a plain old, standard-issue charger to keep it going.
- rachelbythebay 6y agoYep. Important to note that this is Envoy the company, not Envoy the pink mustache factory thing used to let people do terrible things with HTTP. Random note: red teams <3 the networks used by "room tools" and the like. They usually have access to all kinds of tasty tasty data!
- freeqaz 6y agoLmao @ pink mustache factory. That slayed me. I was definitely uncertain if OP meant Envoy the service mesh or not. Was thinking, "has cloud infrastructure gone too far?" Thank you for clarifying!
- pmiller2 6y agoIt's even funnier because we also use the pink mustache factory tool at work, just not for scheduling meetings. I never thought to elaborate, because the meeting room management software is the one I interact with most. The other is mostly transparent to me as a lowly app backend engineer, and I'm glad for that.
- numpad0 6y agoSo this is essentially a Sun Ray for use at former Sun HQ? Like for some irony’s sake?
- bredren 6y agoOregon State University bought a ton of these for the major library remodel around 1998. They were really bad and no one used them.
- srtjstjsj 6y agoWhat's wrong with SunRay? We loved them for kiosks.
- dehrmann 6y agoThere's a reminder that it's an old Sun campus: https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back-of-facebooks-sign-2014-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/why-suns-logo-is-on-the-back...
- mrweasel 6y agoI'm a little sad now. At least they could clean the Sun logo up a bit.
- finnthehuman 6y ago>It demonstrates what can happen when you're on top but fail to innovate. Sun did innovate, they didn't capitalize.
- maverwa 6y agoIf you search the web for "FBG-1701", at least for me with ddg, it turns up a user manual for "Quanta Computer QF7" and the FCC reports. Theres the same ID mentioned in the tweets but no mention of fb. So just some OEM item rebranded? FCC infos: https://fccid.io/HFS-QF7 https://fccid.io/HFS-QF7
- CGamesPlay 6y ago> Thanks, junk stores. I wonder if the barcode displayed on the screen is going to get some careless sod fired.
- pbalau 6y agoOne of the design goals was to make device "misplacement" a non issue. The results the twitter poster had proves this goal was achieved.
- forgotmypw17 6y agonojs: https://nitter.net/Foone/status/1310377930661351424 https://nitter.net/Foone/status/1310377930661351424
- phillco 6y agoYou'd probably write these off as "$BIG_CO reinvents the wheel", but a few things these things did really well: - Big bright LED ring around the outside that glows red or green to tell you if the room was available. This was very useful when performing one of the most common big company rituals, craning your head while speedwalking to try to find a free meeting room. - 1-tap to book a room when you found such a free meeting room. They listed a bunch of common durations, including ones that rounded up to the next half-hour/hour. - The "outside" Gizmo is integrated with an identical Gizmo inside the room that controls the VC equipment, providing a consistent UX. This is something I only appreciated after leaving: at my current company, the two are sourced from different companies and don't integrate -- you have to exit the meeting room and use the "outside" tablet to extend your meeting or check in, for example. - When a meeting was running over and people checked in on the "outside" Gizmo, a loud ping sounded on the "inside" Gizmo to tell everybody to GTFO. This was not always successful. Some pictures: https://andrea-locatelli.com/facebook-roomtool https://andrea-locatelli.com/facebook-roomtool
- rachelbythebay 6y agoPro tip: once people are working in offices again, if this happens, whip out your phone and dial the room directly. People tend to speed up when they realize they are blocking someone far away from dialing in, even when they don't seem to give a crap about the people standing just outside the door. Of course, the ones who see your name dialing in and then spot you outside the room a few seconds later will be confused at first, and later may get annoyed with you, but remember, they were the ones who were being abusive.
- lightgreen 6y agoIt’s OK-ish to just open the door, say something like “uh sorry our meeting just started in this room”, then leave but keep the door open.
- phillco 6y agoI always wanted to breeze in, sit down, and say, “so, what are we talking about?” but never had the guts.
- saagarjha 6y agoA lot of comments here with interesting context, but what I’m curious about is what it runs. Some custom Linux? Android?
- sophiebits 6y agoI can’t remember what the hosting OS is but it just runs a Chrome fork; all of the (many) apps are web-based.
- jauer 6y agoCustom image built on Yocto
- theshrike79 6y agoI'll take Twitter threads, which should've been blog posts for $100, please. In readable form: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1310377930661351424.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1310377930661351424.html
- fortyseven 6y agoParrrrrrtially disagree. Maybe it's because I'm used to Twitter for nifty info dumps like this, but threads like this can be fun, too. You're seeing the discovery happen in realtime, and people can react and ask questions as it happens. It's quite enjoyable to see it all unfold if you catch threads like this happening. Now, AFTERWARD, a more traditional blog post summing it all up would be nice. If the author has one, at least.
- theshrike79 6y agoTrue. Foone's stuff is great if you happen to stumble upon it at the second they start the discovery. But because of the earth being round and us being on different sides of it, this never happens to me =) Afterwards it's just tedious to wrestle with Twitter's shitty UX to get the whole thing. Threadreader and its ilk are a good midway point, I'd still prefer for Twitter to have a native "make this tweetstorm a blogpost" button for those authors who don't do blogs for some reason.
- theon144 6y agoI'll take a Twitter thread which would not have been a blog post or any other kind of format otherwise, thanks :)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dan_hawkins 6y agoEhm... https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1310434318490034176 https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1310434318490034176
- saltedonion 6y agoA company so rich they designed their own meeting room booking hardware. This is blowing my peasant mind
- bdd 6y agoTry this: Incumbent products are so bad and so expensive to the degree it’s noticeable for a company this rich. Noticeable enough that it decides to spend money in engineering and highly custom hardware manufacturing is still a better bang for buck.
- scottmac 6y ago100% this ^ The initial cost of the Gizmo was around the same as an iPad but the long term maintenance cost was significantly less. Every building at Facebook probably has a couple of hundred of these devices between reception, building maps, room tools, monitoring dashboards and video conference controllers.
- jsumrall 6y agoLooks neat, wish I had these in my office. Anyone have recommendations for something similar? Really like the lights and the "report unattended" button for potentially clearing forgotten meetings.
- huhtenberg 6y agoShould've gone with Telescreen for the name.
- mschuster91 6y ago> I wonder what they were doing in this thing that needed this much CPU power? Qseven is ... tiny, with total module consumption limited to a measly 12 watts. For those who want actual massive lots of CPU power in their embedded projects, have a look at COMexpress. I've seen people stuffing i7 and Xeon processors on the Basic sized modules, there's a lot of power one can have with 130 watts. Only downside is, the connectors cost a boatload of money.
- emilfihlman 6y agoGah I'm super annoyed he took it apart first before powering it! That's the thing you do after you have finished playing around with it in software! And god damn Twitter's UI and UX sucks.
- Tepix 6y agoIf you want a smart networked sign on the outside of your meeting rooms with some buttons, i think an ESP8266 with an e-Ink display would be perfect (and very cheap!). It could even last a long time with just a rechargable battery. Sort of like the SHA2017 hacker camp badge https://wiki.sha2017.org/w/Projects:Badge https://wiki.sha2017.org/w/Projects:Badge
- Gaelan 6y agoI think someone makes e-ink devices for specifically this purpose! My former workplace bought some, but it turned out they didn't work on our 5GHz-only wifi. Don't remember the name, sadly.
- Machado117 6y agoWas it a Joan?
- Gaelan 6y agoI think so, yes.
- tomasreimers 6y agoAs a former FBer, I can honestly say that I would buy these for my company if FB sold them (sadly I just don't think the TAM is there for them to even try). My understanding is that they are basically secure terminals (PoE and requires network to boot, meaning it's hard to unplug and steal) that run persistent webpages (so people make "apps" by writing JS + HTML) and have unique names consisting of random words (e.g. "strong-blue-cardinal") such that you could go to an internal tool and push your webpage to any Gizmo you knew the name of (and were on the ACL for). At FB they are used for everything from - meeting room booking (the LEDs on the side indicate whether the room is booked, red; booked but not yet checked in to, yellow; available, green; non-reservable, blue; looking down a hallway it was fairly simple to decide if something was available). - dashboards (we used to use Mac minis) - misc stuff (iirc there was even a hackathon to see what else people would build) Contrast this to now where I need to run a metrics dashboard and can't figure out what hardware to use (we settled on a chromebit, but why do I need all of chromeos to basically run one webpage). Like I said, would happily buy.
- kingnothing 6y agoIf you're just looking for meeting room scheduling on a screen outside every door, buy the hardware, like a cheap iPad, and use Zoom Rooms for the scheduling. https://zoom.us/zoomrooms/software https://zoom.us/zoomrooms/software