Facebook Gizmo
twitter.com
twitter.com
- Big bright LED ring around the outside that glows red or green to tell you if the room was available. This was very useful when performing one of the most common big company rituals, craning your head while speedwalking to try to find a free meeting room.
- 1-tap to book a room when you found such a free meeting room. They listed a bunch of common durations, including ones that rounded up to the next half-hour/hour.
- The "outside" Gizmo is integrated with an identical Gizmo inside the room that controls the VC equipment, providing a consistent UX. This is something I only appreciated after leaving: at my current company, the two are sourced from different companies and don't integrate -- you have to exit the meeting room and use the "outside" tablet to extend your meeting or check in, for example.
- When a meeting was running over and people checked in on the "outside" Gizmo, a loud ping sounded on the "inside" Gizmo to tell everybody to GTFO. This was not always successful.
Some pictures: https://andrea-locatelli.com/facebook-roomtool
On the one hand, I agree that these devices are pretty useful, and there is some measure of thanks for the big companies inventing them. On the other hand, these devices don’t seem to be as well-marketed compared to the things the big companies are known for (probably because the margins are probably not as good at big company scale / the big company is too specialized around its cash cows to really refine these innovations into something that people or other companies would buy). It seems like an innovator’s dilemma to me.
I guess I have better idea of what Steve Jobs and Bill Gates meant when they said that they only used some of the ideas they saw at Xerox PARC.
Follow-up questions:
1. Have you seen anything at any of the companies that you’ve worked at and isn’t part of the company’s business, but is cool and should/could be used elsewhere?
2. In contrast to 1., have you seen anything that some of the companies that you’ve worked that isn’t part of the business that they repeatedly perform poorly?
Of course, the ones who see your name dialing in and then spot you outside the room a few seconds later will be confused at first, and later may get annoyed with you, but remember, they were the ones who were being abusive.
I can't tell you how often my team knocked at door A to throw out another group that then all left by door B, leaving us waiting outside until we knocked again 5min later.
I always did the knock-on-door + tell them my meeting time has started and never had an issue, be assertive and people will move quickly. Escalating impoliteness doesn't help anyone except your own sense of self-justice.
Eventually broke the habit, but for the time I was doing it it did break up the previous meeting pretty quickly.
Anyway, peers shouldn't blame each other for management refusing to provide enough meeting space. It's management's fault.
So, it depends. :)
The radishes were neat since they managed to do what they did from whatever power they could scrape from their solar cells. This is impressive when you consider they were indoors! They also had some 802.15 type thing going on, albeit with funky little boxes scattered throughout doing gateway work. I was disappointed when that project was discontinued before it got very far.
From the other comments here, it looks like this thing is basically the equivalent of the iPads we have running Envoy outside every conference room at my company. We weren’t nearly so clever. Our setup just has an ordinary Lightning cable going to a plain old, standard-issue charger to keep it going.
Important to note that this is Envoy the company, not Envoy the pink mustache factory thing used to let people do terrible things with HTTP.
Random note: red teams <3 the networks used by "room tools" and the like. They usually have access to all kinds of tasty tasty data!
Was this just the early models or is this still the case?
I do wonder why there are so many commercial solutions for basically "a tablet, just a bit different".
Personally I think an iPad outside a conference room is a waste of capability but it shouldn’t harm the device or be dangerous.
My understanding is that they are basically secure terminals (PoE and requires network to boot, meaning it's hard to unplug and steal) that run persistent webpages (so people make "apps" by writing JS + HTML) and have unique names consisting of random words (e.g. "strong-blue-cardinal") such that you could go to an internal tool and push your webpage to any Gizmo you knew the name of (and were on the ACL for). At FB they are used for everything from
- meeting room booking (the LEDs on the side indicate whether the room is booked, red; booked but not yet checked in to, yellow; available, green; non-reservable, blue; looking down a hallway it was fairly simple to decide if something was available). - dashboards (we used to use Mac minis) - misc stuff (iirc there was even a hackathon to see what else people would build)
Contrast this to now where I need to run a metrics dashboard and can't figure out what hardware to use (we settled on a chromebit, but why do I need all of chromeos to basically run one webpage). Like I said, would happily buy.
The initial cost of the Gizmo was around the same as an iPad but the long term maintenance cost was significantly less.
Every building at Facebook probably has a couple of hundred of these devices between reception, building maps, room tools, monitoring dashboards and video conference controllers.
Sun did innovate, they didn't capitalize.
They were really bad and no one used them.
It's packaged the way it is because employees can order them to hack on them. Presumably to encourage making more mundane office fixtures.
Qseven is ... tiny, with total module consumption limited to a measly 12 watts.
For those who want actual massive lots of CPU power in their embedded projects, have a look at COMexpress. I've seen people stuffing i7 and Xeon processors on the Basic sized modules, there's a lot of power one can have with 130 watts. Only downside is, the connectors cost a boatload of money.
Sort of like the SHA2017 hacker camp badge https://wiki.sha2017.org/w/Projects:Badge
FCC infos: https://fccid.io/HFS-QF7
I wonder if the barcode displayed on the screen is going to get some careless sod fired.
Gizmos are used for basically any screen at Facebook that needs to display "live" information -- conference rooms, building maps, monitoring dashboards, etc. Each one has a provisioned identity protected by secure boot and hardware root of trust. They have a minimum of onboard storage (maybe even nothing mutable/persistent after boot?) so they're not a foothold for persistence.
1) It allows them to actually work with hardware and cross pollinate knowledge to their consumer hardware businesses. And I’m not talking only about the hardware itself but all the institutional knowledge required to negotiate with vendors, outsource circuit design and procure parts.
2) They can create one device that is multi-purpose like this one and control every low level detail so it can be used even for security critical tasks.
3) They can test the devices against their own infrastructure and collect low level data that is useful for developing video/voice services and encrypted services in real case scenarios.
In general it just makes sense. Facebook’s market cap is 6X larger than Cisco and it employs 50k people. At that scale and for a company like FB, this doesn’t sound crazy.
They were multi functional:
- Room Check-in devices (replacing Nexus 7s)
- Building Maps (replacing mac-minis)
- Reception Check-in (replacing iPads)
- Employee Dashboards (replacing mac-minis)
- Video conference control panels (replacing the cisco device)
The advantages they had were:
- Single SKU for IT Operations
- Pulled down a fresh image on each boot and had no state which made IT and security happier
- Could join the correct VLAN via 802.11x, the key lived on the TPM chip which made security happy
- Powered via PoE allowed remote restarts
Any idea why Facebook never marketed these?
> Any idea why Facebook never marketed these?
This was designed to fit with internal Facebook frameworks and network capabilities. The device itself does not do much, in most cases just starts a browser and points it to an internal webapp. The device is just the presentation layer of a great deal of backend work that can't be easily extracted as a product.
- Get "misplaced", nothing of value can be stolen.
Considering the results the twitter user had, mission accomplished.
They were developed independently.
Maintaining a fleet of android devices sucks hard, especially when they are on devices that are not really designed to be remotely controlled (any kind of tablet is really not that well designed to be managed remotely (ie has batteries, only works on wifi, not onboard TPM thats useful))
Plus they are posted in every room where sensitive conversations are going on, not only that there is a list of who's going to be in those meetings. Not only that, they have access to video conferencing in each room as well.
Combine that with the portal offering, I can see the compelling value add.
as for "not a hardware company" their datacentres are almost entirely custom.
But I think saying they are not a hardware company is a bit unfair. Oculus by itself is a tremendously hard and complex hardware business. Portal less so, but it’s still a meaningful device with a lot of complexity.
Also Facebook infrastructure must have hundreds of proprietary hardware elements that are built specifically for their own use cases.
But I get what you’re saying. From all the tech behemoths, FB is the by far the least experienced in hardware. But I think it’s pretty clear that FB sees hardware as a column of their long term vision. That alone is enough reason to invest on developing your own hardware.
> There's something amazing about it just being called Gizmo
> Like, what could go wrong?
(For anyone who doesn't recognize it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremlins )
And god damn Twitter's UI and UX sucks.
In readable form: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1310377930661351424.html
You're seeing the discovery happen in realtime, and people can react and ask questions as it happens. It's quite enjoyable to see it all unfold if you catch threads like this happening.
Now, AFTERWARD, a more traditional blog post summing it all up would be nice. If the author has one, at least.
Afterwards it's just tedious to wrestle with Twitter's shitty UX to get the whole thing.
Threadreader and its ilk are a good midway point, I'd still prefer for Twitter to have a native "make this tweetstorm a blogpost" button for those authors who don't do blogs for some reason.
Edit: misplaced edit lol.