BORK!BORK!BORK! Paris might sometimes be called “The City of Light” or perhaps “The City of Love” by the romantically inclined. Judging by this hotel’s elevators, “The City of Bork” is more appropriate.
Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Nathaniel in a Paris hotel, what we assume to be digital signage is instead stalled on the all too familiar American Megatrends BIOS configuration screen. The computer behind the scenes also seems a bit overpowered to serve information for hotel services.
Instead of enticing elevator riders into the undoubtedly delightful bars and restaurants of the establishment (apparently a Novotel not far from the Eiffel Tower) or whatever it should be doing, this screen has temptations of an altogether more technical nature.
A CometLake CPU? An i5 no less? Sort of up-to-date. And that 8 GB of RAM? The way memory prices are going, that might be enough to buy you a nice hotel room in some cities, and at least a decent coffee and a croque monsieur in Paris.
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.
I don’t know… I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4 for a home server and I have 243 days straight of uptime and I’ve never had it crash. It’s a great little server doing a good running Pihole and unbound.
I have RPis for DNS. Five years without a hitch on Pi4s
3D printer has been running on a Pi3 for almost 8 years.
Depends on how. Although I hate how everything is a web page nowadays.
The x86 monopolists and most aarch64 chips have those. Although not always wired and/or enabled correctly. On ARM it’s often used to reboot: literally just shutdown without resetting watchdog.
All we want is a page that shows various stats about work related things. They refresh every 20 minutes to get the latest info. But the most common point of failure is the network. Wired PIs seem fine, but wireless? Nah.
The PIs are set to fully reboot once a week, but even that doesn’t work. At least once a week at least one will just disconnect from the network and not reconnect. I set up something to restart the network service since I found out that’s what was failing, but that doesn’t fix all of them. Sometimes they’ll just completely lock up. So at least once a month someone will have to manually reboot one of them. Most are in easy to reach places, but a few require some OSHA violations to get to.
Oh wow, amazing. Well, the Raspberry Pis all have Broadc*m SOCs. Which means they have relatively good mainline Linux support overall, but that also means Broadc*m Wi-Fi. That’s god awful. I’ve witnessed two laptops with these and on both it’s miserable. My lifehack of sorts was making a desktop shortcut and/or shell alias:
sudo rmmod wl && sudo modprobe wl.Better a web page than some pile of surveillance capitalist dog shit from an app store…
wait until you hear about web fingerprinting