this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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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!

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[–] [email protected] 123 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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.

[–] potatopotato 47 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] pinkfootedgoose 12 points 1 year ago

Great explanation. I'd be one of those web Devs.

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