Raspberry pi 4 inside abandoned scooters

czardestructo@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 322 points – Raspberry Pis Found in Abandoned Spin Scooters in Seattle
tomshardware.com

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!

62

Oh so that's why you can't buy them anymore, people are using them as microcontrollers.

Pis are pretty commonly used in industrial automation use cases (production lines, robot arms, etc) too. They're not the best thing for those use cases, but they're far cheaper than anything else, and anyone with basic programming knowledge can get something running on them, rather than having to find someone experienced with embedded systems (usually in C or C++).

When there were major supply chain issues, a lot of the limited supply was going towards those use cases, as the companies using them had already placed large orders very far in advance.

It wasn't just that they placed orders in advance. The pi foundation literally told people it was prioritizing those customers over anyone else. Kinda shitty IMO, considering the reason the pi was built in the first place.

I'm not well versed on the details surrounding this, but it sounds like Pi pivoted to supply businesses during the chip shortage, instead of direct to consumer in the more hobbyist space.

That seems like a win win, well within moral business practice.

Yes, Pi was founded (afaik) as a cheap minimalist PC. No thrills or bullshit, with a strong moral stance on making a barebones PC available to all.

Pivoting to help keep a global chip shortage from causing a global collapse of anything needing simple circuit boards isn't evil. It's helping everyone get through potentially a lot worse than not having access to a mostly hobbyist device. And it probably meant they could use their own impacted supply line in the most efficient way possible.

Hopefully the consumer Pi isn't lost for good, but this seems far from corporate greed, but a necessary concession during a global disaster.

Wait, a company can just decide to abandon hundreds of their hardware in the middle the streets?

Companies can just dump shit wherever when they're done with it and have no responsibility to clean it up?

🌎👨‍🚀🔫👩‍🚀

It's not abandoned property unless the finder doesn't know who it belongs to.

If the name of the company is on the scooter, it is mislaid property, not abandoned property.

The classic bar exam question on this involves the finder of a bag of money. In one hypothetical, it's a plain canvas bag. In another, it has the name of a bank on the bag.

When the name is there, you have to give it back. The finder only gets to keep it if after legal notice and a waiting period, the owner fails to reclaim it. In most states there is a statute on this, and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.

I’d be willing to risk it all for the pi.

honestly, I would too. even though supplies are starting to bounce back (mainly in the USA, and I'm not in the USA), a free Pi is a free Pi. I generally can find uses for more pi's.....

When the fine for littering and the cost of repair or recycling is higher than what you can recoup from this sort of lost property, it's a win win for the police.

What if the "bag of money" didn't have any money in it at all, and the cost of recovering and properly disposing of the "bag of money" cost the legal owners more than what the bag and it's contents are worth?

Oh, sure, it comes down to knowledge of the facts. If the owner manifests an intention not to recover it, then it is abandoned. But if you just find the scooter, or even if the company has said it's going out of business, that's not the same as having knowledge that the owner has no intent to retrieve the property.

and most of them require turning the property over to police temporarily.

This is probably paranoid, but I always assumed that a cop would get his cousin to come in and claim it, or that the station would just keep it and then be like "oh yeah... yeah the owner claimed that 2 days before the expiration period".

Official protocols aside; this is exactly what would happen lmao

So are rentals scooters still popular in US cities or has that trend subsided? Last I heard people were getting fed up finding them everywhere, problems with vandals, etc.

In my European city they're still popular but imho it's a grift to get money from investors with large pockets. I see brands popping out and go out of the market in 6 months. They just need to lose just the right amount of money in order to have the longest list of supported cities at the moment of raising capital. It's an application that's too expensive for every day use (1 euro unlock fee + 20 cents a minute in a city with a subway and extensive bus network???) but at the same time that ridiculous amount of money is clearly not enough to be sustainable. And they all use dark patterns. App forces you to register with email and sms verification just to see prices and you need to recharge credit that you might be never be able to use. Most they auto charge the credit card for 10 euro as soon as the credit goes under 5 euro.

Maybe the real money making activity is unusable credit in user accounts?

Yeah the pricing only makes sense for occasional use, yet of course they market it for your daily commutes as well. It would cost me about 5€ to ride to work with those, another 5€ to ride back, which would total something like 100€ per month.

I just bought my own instead as, it's a fun, practical and cheap way to commute if you own your own. I can easily carry it with me to my apartment so it doesn't get stolen and costs next to nothing to use compared to a car.

Yes, for commutes don't make any sense

I got a 60 min coupon to try the service, to go home I take the subway then I choose between bus + 2 min walk or just 10 minutes walk. With the scooter I can do it in 5 minutes but:

  1. It took one minute to unlock

  2. I could be fined as my city requires all riders to have an helmet

  3. It takes 5+ minutes to lock because the app is "smart" and uses ai to see from a picture if you parked it correctly. No signal or bad lighting makes the photo unclear? Try to park in a different neighborhood...

So I pay 2 euro for do the same route in the same time that I would take by foot. Not good for commutes, not good for short routes, not good for long routes

Not living in a city with these scooters but in a country that has 10+ different virtual wallets services. I can tell you 101% it's all about the credit sit in the customers' accounts that obviously easy but not straightforward to pull out and stay there a long long time.

It was never about the "convenience" for anyone. It's the same scheme of holding people's credit.

Same in my smaller UK city. If you're a tourist, it's probably a decent idea. Might work in London or somewhere like that. But Nottingham? Who is going there to see the sights? There's only a slightly rubbish castle. Don't take long to see that. Most of the Robin Hood tat is up at Sherwood Forest, and you ain't taking a toy scooter to go and see that.

For a commuter, that scooter would be taken to their office, would sit outside all day, then they'd take it back. Just the regular 9 to 5 workday. That's not a sustainable business model. They'd need to be just in a really busy area, and in use all the time.

You can make more money with a flop than with a hit??

I hope to see the prison yard scooter industry taking investors soon.

My city still has them. They get picked up every night and put at whatever corners or lots they gather them to.

Honestly in my experience anyone that's complained about them has no idea at all what they do or how they work, so anyone "fed up finding them everywhere" is simply ignorant 99% of the time. They're supposed to be everywhere lol that's the entire point.

That’s all fine until they’re blocking sidewalks and access ways. Trying to push a stroller or wheelchair through the renta-scooter slalom course is horrible.

In my city, we have strict parking designated zones and you have to take a photo. If it's left on the sidewalk or road, it won't let you end the trip, implies it will fine you, plus they'll send someone to move it.

Likewise. I live in an extremely high foot traffic/high scooter traffic area (beach town in SoCal) and I very rarely see them anywhere outside of the designated zones.

I'm glad you're not over exaggerating or anything

S/He is not. Even one blocked sidewalk means that I need to double back on the block if I am using my wheelchair. One scooter is all it takes, and depending on the length of the block, it can easily add 20 minutes to a commute.

I didn’t say they block every sidewalk in the city. I said when they DO it’s extremely disruptive. Relax.

I live in a major US city, and yes they are still everywhere and being used. Here they have an actual use since walkability isn't the best, and at worse are just a nuisance with the way they block parts of the sidewalk and can be left anywhere with little consequence.

lots of people throw them in the river

Which is incredibly gross. Stealing components from them is at least practical, but destroying them for funsies is equal parts childish and wasteful and not to mention dangerous. No one needs additional garbage to fish out of the water.

Shouldn't leave them on the sidewalk then

That’s gross, and so are you.

Whatever, get your trash off the sidewalk

They take up way less space than what's allocated for cars. But because it appears different you'll not notice that the car parking takes away so much space that could be allocated to e.g. a wider sidewalk, dedicated bike lines, more green, or parking for more space efficient methods of transport such as rental scooters.

I’m against car parking on streets too, that doesn’t mean random companies should get to dump their product anywhere they want on the sidewalks.

How is trash in the river better?

Can you just take apart abandoned things for parts in the states? Probably just have to be a white male and no problems?

Probably, who is gonna come after you? The company has decided it is too expensive to repossess them.

in Germany it would count as theft and destroying of property of others even if it's abandoned.

Technically it’s theft in the US too, but the owner doesn’t exist anymore so no one’s going after you (assuming cops don’t see you)

1 more...

What oppressed society do you live in where an item abandoned in the streets isn't fair game? Does your realm not know the law of "finders keepers"??

Back in the day when we used to be able to just leave our bikes anywhere around town and expect them to still be there, the one token black kid got accused by an adult I didn't know of stealing my essentially abandoned bike that I told him he could borrow and what it looked like and where I left it. That kinda just stuck with me for the rest of my life. It also clearly stuck with some of the other kids because a bunch of them kept saying shit about Tyrone stealing my bike and that wasn't even his name...

1 more...

So that's where all the damn Pi4s went.

Well, they sure as fuck didn't go to the hobbyist market, we've been getting fucked by the rPi foundation for 3 years now.