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!
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.
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.
It’s a lot cheaper than getting an EE to design you a more efficient bespoke solution.
Could just buy an ESP32 board instead, at least that doesn’t suck down power and need to boot Linux to function.
This is what I mean. It’s not like they are running some kind of image processing or literally anything heavy.
Just seems way over the top. Also my bet is it they didn’t bother with bespoke hardware they probably didn’t do much to power optimize.