7 ms·

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

by samtho 3y ago

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. This all makes me irrationally irritated.

aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
mschuster91 3y ago
> 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.
- majormajor 3y ago
  Sounds like a good way to make your hardware easy to steal.
  - post-it 3y ago
    It's a 20 kg scooter, of course it's easy to steal.
    - majormajor 3y ago
      A halfway-competent operation management team would see that as a reason to make the hardware harder to repurpose, not easier. Big organized operations can figure shit out, but put some barriers in front of the script-kiddie/homeless-dude contingent. A me-too copycat startup like Spin who got kicked out of Seattle a year ago ( https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2022/05/13/city-announces-new-scooter-and-bike-share-permits-spin-and-wheels-are-out-bird-is-in/ https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2022/05/13/city-announces-ne... ) doing it this way doesn't seem like a great endorsement to me. You have to spend $$$ up front on thousands of vehicles that cost hundreds of dollars each, and your marginal revenue per ride ain't great. Putting a dent in your vehicle theft rate becomes a big deal fast.
      - post-it 3y ago
        A halfway-competent operation management team would run the numbers to see if there are enough people stealing scooters and stripping them for parts to justify developing proprietary hardware. They probably did and the answer was probably "no."
        majormajor 3y ago
        I'm doubtful that a copycat operation like Spin really ran the numbers as much as a much-higher-scale operation like Lime who clearly came to the "yes, we need custom shit" conclusion: https://flutterawesome.com/custom-iot-for-lime-gen-3-e-scooter-and-info-about-serial-communication/ https://flutterawesome.com/custom-iot-for-lime-gen-3-e-scoot...
amelius 3y ago
Perhaps they just used the Pi to reduce the time to market. I don't see what's wrong with that.
- hattmall 3y ago
  Because it's not AT ALL the right tool for the job. And it shows that they don't even have one remotely competent hardware person on the team. Yes, it can work, but even at retail it's too expensive, requires too much power, and has a vastly higher rate of problems than many other off the shelf, far cheaper and much more widely available products.
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    > ... Yes, it can work, but even at retail it's too expensive ... Is it? $35 seems pretty cheap for an SBC that does what you need it to, with you having to do zero of the engineering work yourself. I think most industrial SBCs cost way more than $35. > ... requires too much power ... Pi 4 consumes 2-6W. [1] Scooter batteries are 400-600Wh based on a cursory glance, so we're talking up to two weeks of idle time. The scooter only goes 12-15 miles, and at 10mph, that's going to be a significantly bigger issue. > ... and has a vastly higher rate of problems than many other off the shelf, far cheaper and much more widely available products. Which products would you recommend, and also, do you have any data on the failure rates of the Pi? I'm curious. Is it prefect? No, probably not. But if you only need a few thousand units, and you're trying to prove out the product market fit, why isn't this a great solution? Think of all the millions in capital they didn't waste building a custom solution. Personally, I respect the hustle. [1] https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption
    - samtho 3y ago
      With respect, your assumption here reads like a line from arrested development: “how much can a banana cost, $10?” I really don’t think you have any idea of not the costs of these things, every penny counts with hardware products because any amount increases the marginal cost by at least 1.5x, vs software where it is so low it is effectively zero. I can get a very beefy STM32 for sub $10 at low quantities (sub $5 at > 1000) and toss all the passives and connectors needed for an extra $2-$4 the PCB may cost $1-$5, and you might be at $10-$15 depending on volume. You also can pre buy components that are known run out or design the board to accept different MCUs incase of shortages. With the RPi, you are totally SOL if you cannot find them, with your company being at the tail end of a, now, know volatile supply chain with a company you cannot get guaranteed fulfillment contracts with. Your assumption about power is also very divorced from the reality of the situation, battery performance is not so easily calculated when your battery is not in clean room conditions, these scooters are subjected to extreme conditions and abuse, all of which can affect the battery. Additionally, It is disingenuous to consider only the operating parameters because it does run a full Linux system and software you load into it creates non-deterministic (at least with current models) situations where new software can skyrocket the power consumption. They also ideally have a separate battery from the drive motors so it can call for help and a tech can collect the scooter for maintenance.
Palomides 3y ago
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
- nomel 3y ago
  Every company I’ve worked for used these types of boards to some extent, for R&D.
arcticbull 3y ago
> 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. The issue is supply, not demand.
- xeckr 3y ago
  >RPIs are out of stock because they're useful - this company found a use for them. 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.
  - notatoad 3y ago
    developing for esp32 is way more difficult than developing for raspi. raspi lets you basically treat it like a normal computer, you can use standard python and sqlite and install whatever nonsense you want from pip and basically assume it will run whatever your laptop can. it means you can hire kids straight out of school, or outsource to india, and whoever you get can work on it without really any concern - it'll run whatever crap you give it. esp32 is embedded enough that you have to develop for it like you develop embedded software - you need to do things like think about how much ram you're using that you just don't have to on raspi.
kierank 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
brigadier132 3y ago
> the city as technological blight strewn across the landscape, left to rust You should get a job at the New York Times > This all makes me irrationally... I can tell
mcdonje 3y ago
Seems like your irritation is actually pretty rational.
jrockway 3y ago
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!
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  Where do you live that embedded systems folks cost more than a generic Python dev? Everywhere I've ever heard of, ES is on the low end of the pay scale for software. Python is usually in the middle somewhere. That's definitely true in Seattle as well.
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    +1 unless you work for google or maybe nvidia embedded get paid less than fronted devs straight outta bootcamp. at least that was the case last time i looked at those roles a few years back.
fellowmartian 3y ago
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.
- internetter 3y ago
  > I’d wager you never tried to launch an embedded Linux-powered product I'd wager most people go with a RTOS
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    Outside a few open source options like zephyr (and FreeRTOS to a lesser extent), RTOSes typically have a worse developer experience than even the shittiest vendor kernel trees. At least Linux doesn't dictate your choice of dev tools like most of the commercial RTOSes do and the libc usually works.
    - internetter 3y ago
      I quite like Zephyr? Are you saying it's somehow worse than Linux? I agree there's plenty of garbage though.
      - AlotOfReading 3y ago
        The opposite. Zephyr is one of the more ergonomic RTOSes. Compare that experience to what's offered by VxWorks or Green Hills, which feel like taking a time machine back to the early 2000s in terms of productivity and features.
seizethecheese 3y ago
> 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.
WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago
That was my first reaction.. if that's true, what a waste..
ravenstine 3y ago
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?
- barbazoo 3y ago
  What makes the RPi "hobby hardware"?
  - ravenstine 3y ago
    I'm referring to the OP's terminology, but it's also not entirely untrue. The intent of the Raspberry Pi was/is not to be a shortcut for tech startups who can't C++ their way out of a paper bag. It's also not like the Rpi has enough power to be of practical use to the average person, or even most atypical folks, hence it's more of a hobby or educational tool.
    - barbazoo 3y ago
      Interesting, but this has a hint of gatekeeping I would say. If someone makes a product and it's somewhat successful, who cares what it's built on!? The actual intent according to their website is > Computing for everybody > From industries large and small, to the kitchen table tinkerer, to the classroom coder, we make computing accessible and affordable for everybody. https://www.raspberrypi.com/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/ I would say that's exactly what we're seeing here.
marcosdumay 3y ago
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.
ahupp 3y ago
The second line of the raspberrypi.org website says "From industries large and small .. we make computing accessible and affordable for everybody." If I wasn't personally involved in building something I'd generally assume the engineers were reasonable people making reasonable decisions.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
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?
znpy 3y ago
> they find a raspberry pi, an SBC created for educational and hobby purposes but has been infamously out of stock because Because making a lot of money is more satisfying than supporting education and hobbyists. —- ftfy

by samtho 3y ago

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

mschuster91 3y ago

> 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.

majormajor 3y ago
Sounds like a good way to make your hardware easy to steal.
- post-it 3y ago
  It's a 20 kg scooter, of course it's easy to steal.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    A halfway-competent operation management team would see that as a reason to make the hardware harder to repurpose, not easier. Big organized operations can figure shit out, but put some barriers in front of the script-kiddie/homeless-dude contingent. A me-too copycat startup like Spin who got kicked out of Seattle a year ago ( https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2022/05/13/city-announces-new-scooter-and-bike-share-permits-spin-and-wheels-are-out-bird-is-in/ https://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2022/05/13/city-announces-ne... ) doing it this way doesn't seem like a great endorsement to me. You have to spend $$$ up front on thousands of vehicles that cost hundreds of dollars each, and your marginal revenue per ride ain't great. Putting a dent in your vehicle theft rate becomes a big deal fast.
    - post-it 3y ago
      A halfway-competent operation management team would run the numbers to see if there are enough people stealing scooters and stripping them for parts to justify developing proprietary hardware. They probably did and the answer was probably "no."
      - majormajor 3y ago
        I'm doubtful that a copycat operation like Spin really ran the numbers as much as a much-higher-scale operation like Lime who clearly came to the "yes, we need custom shit" conclusion: https://flutterawesome.com/custom-iot-for-lime-gen-3-e-scooter-and-info-about-serial-communication/ https://flutterawesome.com/custom-iot-for-lime-gen-3-e-scoot...

amelius 3y ago

Perhaps they just used the Pi to reduce the time to market. I don't see what's wrong with that.

hattmall 3y ago
Because it's not AT ALL the right tool for the job. And it shows that they don't even have one remotely competent hardware person on the team. Yes, it can work, but even at retail it's too expensive, requires too much power, and has a vastly higher rate of problems than many other off the shelf, far cheaper and much more widely available products.
- arcticbull 3y ago
  > ... Yes, it can work, but even at retail it's too expensive ... Is it? $35 seems pretty cheap for an SBC that does what you need it to, with you having to do zero of the engineering work yourself. I think most industrial SBCs cost way more than $35. > ... requires too much power ... Pi 4 consumes 2-6W. [1] Scooter batteries are 400-600Wh based on a cursory glance, so we're talking up to two weeks of idle time. The scooter only goes 12-15 miles, and at 10mph, that's going to be a significantly bigger issue. > ... and has a vastly higher rate of problems than many other off the shelf, far cheaper and much more widely available products. Which products would you recommend, and also, do you have any data on the failure rates of the Pi? I'm curious. Is it prefect? No, probably not. But if you only need a few thousand units, and you're trying to prove out the product market fit, why isn't this a great solution? Think of all the millions in capital they didn't waste building a custom solution. Personally, I respect the hustle. [1] https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption https://www.pidramble.com/wiki/benchmarks/power-consumption
  - samtho 3y ago
    With respect, your assumption here reads like a line from arrested development: “how much can a banana cost, $10?” I really don’t think you have any idea of not the costs of these things, every penny counts with hardware products because any amount increases the marginal cost by at least 1.5x, vs software where it is so low it is effectively zero. I can get a very beefy STM32 for sub $10 at low quantities (sub $5 at > 1000) and toss all the passives and connectors needed for an extra $2-$4 the PCB may cost $1-$5, and you might be at $10-$15 depending on volume. You also can pre buy components that are known run out or design the board to accept different MCUs incase of shortages. With the RPi, you are totally SOL if you cannot find them, with your company being at the tail end of a, now, know volatile supply chain with a company you cannot get guaranteed fulfillment contracts with. Your assumption about power is also very divorced from the reality of the situation, battery performance is not so easily calculated when your battery is not in clean room conditions, these scooters are subjected to extreme conditions and abuse, all of which can affect the battery. Additionally, It is disingenuous to consider only the operating parameters because it does run a full Linux system and software you load into it creates non-deterministic (at least with current models) situations where new software can skyrocket the power consumption. They also ideally have a separate battery from the drive motors so it can call for help and a tech can collect the scooter for maintenance.

Palomides 3y ago

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

nomel 3y ago
Every company I’ve worked for used these types of boards to some extent, for R&D.

arcticbull 3y ago

> 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. The issue is supply, not demand.

xeckr 3y ago
>RPIs are out of stock because they're useful - this company found a use for them. 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.
- notatoad 3y ago
  developing for esp32 is way more difficult than developing for raspi. raspi lets you basically treat it like a normal computer, you can use standard python and sqlite and install whatever nonsense you want from pip and basically assume it will run whatever your laptop can. it means you can hire kids straight out of school, or outsource to india, and whoever you get can work on it without really any concern - it'll run whatever crap you give it. esp32 is embedded enough that you have to develop for it like you develop embedded software - you need to do things like think about how much ram you're using that you just don't have to on raspi.

kierank 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

brigadier132 3y ago

> the city as technological blight strewn across the landscape, left to rust You should get a job at the New York Times > This all makes me irrationally... I can tell

mcdonje 3y ago

Seems like your irritation is actually pretty rational.

jrockway 3y ago

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!

AlotOfReading 3y ago
Where do you live that embedded systems folks cost more than a generic Python dev? Everywhere I've ever heard of, ES is on the low end of the pay scale for software. Python is usually in the middle somewhere. That's definitely true in Seattle as well.
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  +1 unless you work for google or maybe nvidia embedded get paid less than fronted devs straight outta bootcamp. at least that was the case last time i looked at those roles a few years back.

fellowmartian 3y ago

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.

internetter 3y ago
> I’d wager you never tried to launch an embedded Linux-powered product I'd wager most people go with a RTOS
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  Outside a few open source options like zephyr (and FreeRTOS to a lesser extent), RTOSes typically have a worse developer experience than even the shittiest vendor kernel trees. At least Linux doesn't dictate your choice of dev tools like most of the commercial RTOSes do and the libc usually works.
  - internetter 3y ago
    I quite like Zephyr? Are you saying it's somehow worse than Linux? I agree there's plenty of garbage though.
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      The opposite. Zephyr is one of the more ergonomic RTOSes. Compare that experience to what's offered by VxWorks or Green Hills, which feel like taking a time machine back to the early 2000s in terms of productivity and features.

seizethecheese 3y ago

> 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.

WhereIsTheTruth 3y ago

That was my first reaction.. if that's true, what a waste..

ravenstine 3y ago

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?

barbazoo 3y ago
What makes the RPi "hobby hardware"?
- ravenstine 3y ago
  I'm referring to the OP's terminology, but it's also not entirely untrue. The intent of the Raspberry Pi was/is not to be a shortcut for tech startups who can't C++ their way out of a paper bag. It's also not like the Rpi has enough power to be of practical use to the average person, or even most atypical folks, hence it's more of a hobby or educational tool.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    Interesting, but this has a hint of gatekeeping I would say. If someone makes a product and it's somewhat successful, who cares what it's built on!? The actual intent according to their website is > Computing for everybody > From industries large and small, to the kitchen table tinkerer, to the classroom coder, we make computing accessible and affordable for everybody. https://www.raspberrypi.com/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/ I would say that's exactly what we're seeing here.

marcosdumay 3y ago

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.

ahupp 3y ago

The second line of the raspberrypi.org website says "From industries large and small .. we make computing accessible and affordable for everybody." If I wasn't personally involved in building something I'd generally assume the engineers were reasonable people making reasonable decisions.

mytailorisrich 3y ago

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?

znpy 3y ago

> they find a raspberry pi, an SBC created for educational and hobby purposes but has been infamously out of stock because Because making a lot of money is more satisfying than supporting education and hobbyists. —- ftfy