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Comment by explodingwaffle | Hacker News Reader

Woof. Adafruit + Raspberry Pi in a shipped product screams to me that they did not have a real electronics guy on their team.

https://ukdepartureboards.co.uk/ is the British equivalent of this, and it seems to do everything right (don’t own one, but have seen on Twitter)- optional subscription, and nice looking hardware (seems like they contracted out for that). Though at the minute I suppose there are barely any trains running here :)

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This is all too common in my experience, "oh we could just use an arduino/pi and a hat and a peripheral" rather than "Design a system that does <x>". As an EE who spent their primary career programming (horrors I know) and in systems analysis, I see it as the logical extreme of "why use a 555 when I can program an ATTiny to be a timer and do other stuff too!"

The allure of having one be able to add features "with just a bit of code" is catnip to product managers. They seriously cannot seem to resist going there.

Oof. My electronics stopped before GCSEs, and even I know about 555s.

I can believe someone might prefer software for prototyping, but manufacturing? Well, I've seen prototypes enter production, so yes, but still, ugh.

A attiny might not make sense, but you can get something like the PMS150C for around ~5ct, where it makes more sense to use a single MCU than a 555 with all the extra needed BOM Items.

Well, you can always choose this: https://www.hwlibre.com/en/troll-duino/

Usually yes, but it sometimes makes sense in a very low volume product.

The Code Quality section in the article also listed software red flags that point to the product being Amateur Hour. From the archive.org About Us link OP provided[1], there seemed to be plenty of "coders" but maybe not much embedded SW experience? They couldn't even agree on what language to use, whether to use tabs or spaces, and couldn't manage to produce a pristine Micro SD image without bash_history and a git repository littered onto it.

Kind of reminds me of a small company I used to work for where I noticed shortly after joining that they 1. had no source control or reproducible builds, and 2. ship Debug builds with symbols and no optimizations to customers, because they couldn't get the Release configuration to run without crashing.

1: https://web.archive.org/web/20180107132644/https://www.devsh...

> and it seems to do everything right

Last time I looked they were missing CE conformance, which afaik is pretty illegal. Surprised they haven't been found out yet.

Additionally, the composition of certified products does not lead to a certified product. Even adding an enclosure around a certified board implies the recertification.

This still seems like its fallen into same BOM trap.

You could buy a phone (moto e20), same size as their small display at 90e vs 140e for the board above...

Sell a nice android app, subscription and be done with it.

Phone packs a lot more features.

That's an indescript rectangle that could just show anything and could be from anywhere. They are selling a specific shape of rectangle that shows stuff about London and aesthetically signals that it is from London.

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