Meanwhile, Apollo had only 2 Mhz and 36 KB memory and navigated to the fucking moon.
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Is this part of the elevator, or an advertising billboard installed in the elevator?
Silly goose, they're one and the same!
No, they very much aren't. I doubt this actually has anything to do with the function of the elevator at all.
Probably. But even for a billboard this is overkill!
It is probably the cheapest computer you can buy brand new which you can connect to the Internet to deploy the ads.
Probably not cheapest over all, but cheapest standardized system the advertising company/IT support company they use has. If they can handle even 90% of client needs with this hardware, it means easier and more efficient support on the back end.
Elevator manufacturers sell the displays with their elevators more often than not. The PC is not installed in the elevator, but in the machine room, and the video is being extended alongside the cabling used for the elevator itself.
I went into a store that sells grills. They all had screens. On a fucking barbecue.
I just want a box that makes fire.
Webber Kettle grill. BYOF but no screen in sight.
Remote controls. Why the fuck does every fan and window AC need one? Who genuinely searched through a dozen to find the right one instead of using the damn buttons on the thing?
'Smart' home things. My dryer and microwave can both be connected to the wifi. Never in my life have I put something in either of those devices and wished I could use a network connection to have it start working later. When I put shit in is when I want it to do it's job.
I'm a huge nerd, when you lose me on these 'features' you've definitely lost the plot.
Overkill, yes but also almost surely just a standardized hardware set the company uses regardless of the specific advertising situation.
This set of hardware can run 99% of their client requirements and requires only a single hardware configuration to support. Maybe a couple generations of support as time goes on before older hardware is replaced.
Could this particular use case be handled by something as simple as a raspberry pi? Probably, but almost surely not everything the company that provides the hardware/service/support handles for clients.
We got so far into "hardware is cheap" / "developers are expensive" / abstraction positive feedback loop, we are using a Raspberry Pi to blink a LED, but on a global scale.
Nah we're usong an i5 to blink an LED
Honestly considering the age of this motherboard and cpu. This is legitimately cheaper than a raspberry pi now if you buy used and it’s a lot more powerful. I would also imagine that’ll it’ll be stuck in this elevator forever because why upgrade hardware when this nugget can still show ads completely disconnected from the elevator computer since it’s been doing since 2020. Maybe I would consider this absurd back during the end of Covid but not really that much now. Considering I can buy this for under a hundred dollars on eBay and you should probably be considering as well especially if you wanna run Linux on a cheap machine. Like yeah the ram is probably soldered onto the motherboard and it’s a laptop cpu with integrated graphics worse than that of the intel hd graphics 4000 in my 2012 MacBook. But like you can do a lot with this nugget.
Honestly speaking, using readily available hardware instead of specialty made to operate an elevator isn't a bad idea.
The elevator probably cost $250,000. The i5 is a laptop chip. I’m sure it’s part of a fanless industrial embedded system. I can’t imagine why this is even news.
Meanwhile my company keeps using NUCs to control 9 live video feeds per NUC. And when they inevitably keep crashing because of thermal throttling/dust build up after around a year, they just replace them.
Do you get to keep them?
Is it inflation or 8GB of ram and x86-64 gaming capable CPUs in everything with buttons
There is 2 things to this, its cheaper to buy hardware like a raspberry pi or similar with 8gb of ram and use that to build the elevator. And it might genuinely easier to source the parts and future spare parts.
But as a developer I want to be snarky and say why does a elevator need 8GB, it should have 256MB and use 168 MB max where 100 MB is display graphics and music, 5 is the control system with 3 copies of the variable for redundancy and the rest is telemetry and a memory leak that eats 1MB every 2 weeks because someone is resizing the audio buffer for floor announcements everytime.
But its probably just a mini pc that's using 512Mb all in all running some linux distro. and the 8GB is just not being used.
Raspberry pi’s are unreliable POS. We use some at work to just display a static web page that refreshes a few times an hour and somehow they fail at that. They’re good enough for us since we’re just an office showing some stats. But this is proper digital signage.
For something like this where you really need 100% uptime (except for this) there’s a whole army of specialty PCs built for this role. Passive cooking so there’s no fan to fail, beefy over built power supplies, and usually some built in special IO. They’ll usually have hardware watchdogs too, that’ll reboot the system if it’s not responding.
A friend makes game cabinets for casinos and they have a 100% uptime requirement from some customers. And they use odroids for that. And a casino cabinet has more sensors than I ever though possible.
Edit. With that said the machine in the elevator does not need to have 100% uptime a restart is fine, the security systems and locks are controlled by other systems that are not connectied to the carriage in the hoist way.
The computer in the elevator just places floor calls on another system over a bacnet connection. So it handles media and floor calls.
Edit2. Source misspent youth. I can recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHf1vD5_b5I and there is one more I can't find right now.
So it's not AI data centers after all, elevators are driving the RAM shortage!!!1!
Low powered stuff probably requires more Dev or specialist software, with a off the shelf mini pc you can just put windows with kiosk mode on it. In terms of support time it's probably cheaper than cheaper hardware.
Elevators are Determinite Finite Autonomas ffs. In my theoretical computer science course in college, I wrote a DFA program in python that would have fit on an Arduino.
It sounds like this is running the advertising screen in the elevator, rather than controlling the elevator itself.
I've never been in an elevator with displays like this. I take the stairs on the rare occasion anymore that I'm in a large building.
I think I'd just lean against it, so no one need look at it. However, I'm assuming there's one on each wall, so maybe it's best just to stare at the doors as is tradition.
Billionaires keep finding every possible way, small and large, to be worse.
I wonder to how many more digital signs all over the world this applies to.
On the other hand, considering the cost of custom designing this elevator, building and installing it, the choice of hardware in this single place is rather neglectable.
Is this one of the newer ones with facial tracking? Could that be the reason for the stupid amount of power for images and video?
our HMO medical facilities has elevators with MSMs news, although there isnt any sound.
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