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putting prototypes straight into production is the "tech startup" way!

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.

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.

It's a lot cheaper than getting an EE to design you a more efficient bespoke solution.

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.

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.

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?

I can't say anything about US cities, but they are all over the place in Canadian cities(or at least they are where I live)

My city still has them. They're pretty widely used, but I think we're a good scenario for them. Our sidewalks aren't cramped, we're a very spread out city, and our public transit isn't stellar.

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.

They didn't last where I live, but my mother lives in a town about an hour away (Bloomington, Indiana) which still has them, and they appear to be popular.

They took them out of my small town, mostly due to the company (I think it was Bird in our area) not picking them up for weeks on end.

I'm personally glad they're gone, too many douche canoes leaving them in the handicapped parking spots and on the walking trails. Finally had to lodge a complaint with the company when we found a bunch of them in front of the ER at my workplace...not like we have people who have mobility issues going in there or anything.

Privatized profits, socialized loses.

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

🌎👨‍🚀🔫👩‍🚀

That was my first thought, get a few of them and create yourself a scootermox cluster 😂

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

They’re somewhat popular in Milwaukee, WI too