News Raspberry Pis Found in Abandoned Spin Scooters in Seattle

[Admin]

Residents of Seattle have discovered Raspberry Pi 4Bs inside abandoned electric scooters from the rental company Spin.

Raspberry Pis Found in Abandoned Spin Scooters in Seattle : Read more

 

[Findecanor]

What an abuse of precious Pi4s to have been part of something so nefarious.

 

[scottslayer]

What do you mean "Where was this knowledge when the Pi supply was low?"
We already knew they were offloading supply directly to companies as fast as possible and then tried to claim otherwise.

 

[Seaguy]

Those scooters had sensors that detected (or tried) when the scooter was being ridden on the sidewalk instead of a street or bike lane. I suspect that’s got something to do with the Raspberry Pi’s inclusion on the Spin scooters.

 

[Giroro]

Fun fact: pretty much every scooter in every city is legally abandoned after a couple days without use, regardless of if the company is still in business.
That's the drawback of basing your business model around dumping your product directly into the streets of a city and leaving them there to rot.

 

[edzieba]

We already knew they were offloading supply directly to companies as fast as possible and then tried to claim otherwise.

The RPi foundation were very clear from the start that they were prioritising shipments to industrial customers and fulfilling large backorders over shipping individual units to consumers.

 

[deesider]

Fun fact: pretty much every scooter in every city is legally abandoned after a couple days without use, regardless of if the company is still in business.
That's the drawback of basing your business model around dumping your product directly into the streets of a city and leaving them there to rot.

Facts are the most fun when they're made up

 

[Junry]

As far as the speculation about the Pi being over powered for the scooter. I would not know without looking at the programming and knowing how many points of data the computer had to keep track of.

My guess is to why they used the Pi is it was cheaper then having a custom board designed and made.
1. Fee for design and someone would have to custom write firmware for a new board never used. Easier to just adapt to a already existing board.
2. Price..cheaper than having one designed
3.Processing power. The pi is a versatile little box that can deliver alot of raw computational speed in a small form factor while not drawing much power.

The fact the pi could run off 2.7 watts idle and 5.5 ish Watts when at full capacity. That fact alone for a mobile system that is running off a battery would be a good choice