Hello Particle community!
I am a 27 year old entrepreneur interested in starting a local ride share company for my small town similar to Scoot/Spin/Lime/Bird
My main goal for the month of October is to get a prototype in the works.
I believe i need to order a particle dev board and possibly the boron LTE.
Any advice or suggestions for purchasing IoT devices for my start up?
Im also wondering how i get the circuit board from the scooter to connect with the dev board.
I have ordered the Xiaomi M365 scooter and an additional Xiaomi circuit board.
Does the circuit board need to be custom made to fit the wiring harness of the scooter?
As @Rftop says, do you have any functional criteria? You have a scooters selected already. Great. But what kind of functionality do you need beyond what the stock scooter offers? I would assume, at a minimum, you would want asset location tracking. If this is a pay to use type scenario, I would also assume you would have some sort of remote enable / disable system. After you determine all your functional requirements, you can then start to look at the hardware aspect of things. After you identify your functional requirements, then you should start looking at industrial design aspects. That would include how visible you want your add-on components to be. The technical aspects of the hardware selection will influence your industrial design. For example, if you want to guard against theft, you’ll have to determine how difficult do you want it to be for a thief to modify your scooter back to stock. Or, how visible do you want your external circuitry/enclosure to be to the end user. If you’re not that well versed in firmware development, you want to consult with a firmware developer to make sure your end users don’t get stranded somewhere because of some little technical aspect that was coded incorrectly.
If you don’t want to waste time with an unreleased Device OS and hardware then I would suggest you do as @rftop suggests and order an Electron with the asset track board. It comes with a case and a Lipo battery.
For your scooter ride sharing I would say that you need to first determine your initial objectives (i.e. of a Proof of Concept) - this could be knowing the location of a scooter (using GPS) and remote lock and unlock of the scooter for a user. You will probably also want to measure the battery charge level on the scooter - to warn if a scooter needs to be recharged or is not available for use. You will need to determine with the scooter you have bought how you can most simply lock and unlock the scooter (relay between the battery and the motor) and measure the battery charge level. There is no doubt a charge gauge/display but getting to a signal you can use may not be that easy. The Particle Cloud will provide the transport layer and APIs you will need for your web app or server for users’ mobile apps. Sounds fun.
Im sorry for leaving you all uninformed.
My goals for the start up are as follows.
Build an app for both IOS and Andriod devices
The app needs to be able to scan a bar code on the scooter which will unlock the (control board/circuit board/IoT device) and have (Remote enable/Disable) functionalily. The device needs to be waterproof, it needs to be low battery efficient, it needs to send physical GPS location every 10-20 seconds. It also needs to send battery level of the scooter.
Thank you all so much for you replies and your help! I hope to hear from you and the rest of the community again soon!
3. Theft is another important factor. I intend to start small 10-20 scooters and will be picking up the scooters and charging them myself at the end of the night. No scooters left behind. However it is important, but im not sure what options I have to prevent theft.
liability is another huge factor. somebody on your scooter gets hurt or killed and you have a problem. i doubt any wavier of liability you may try to impose on riders would pass legal muster. this is something you should get some advice on before getting too deep into the project. it has the potential of being a brick wall to successful roll out of the operation. good luck though, i wish you the best in implementing your idea.
@slaporta Are you still developing this product? I am planning to start something similar but less complicated. From my side I would just need an app that would turn activate the Xiaomi m365 when scanning a QR code.
I have been reading a lot, but im not sure whether I would need to change the BLE.
You will need a Gen3 device like a Boron to support BLE unless you intend to add on a BLE module to the Electron. Having recently used a Bird e-scooter in Paris I have a much better idea how these things have been architected. NFC is another technology that Gen3 device support that avoids the need for QR codes to be printed on the scooter and get damaged and unreadable.
So if I just want to do it with QR (I like the idea of NFC, but not all mobiles have the capacity) the Particle Electron module will be enough? Is there any public project available so I can see how it is connected with the hardware of the scooter...? Thanks!!