That’s not bios; that’s the os. It’s not a bsod; that’s systemd running on Linux.
tastes like MEMORY_MANAGEMENT
wait, what was the post about?
Snow cone? Nah, Snow Crash!
Is it just me who feels that having one processing unit per display is a waste?
I mean, I get it why they did it (it’s way easier to just have one SBC per-display, both on the hardware and the software sides), but if designing such a system I would still try to come up with a single board solution if only because waste gets on my nerves.
You’d think a damn sticker would be good enough
Human replaceable printed paper labels, manual stick.
What is this? The 20th century?
It could just be a backlit panel that you place a semi-transparent logo in front. Could be magnetic or slid into place. More resources than a sticker but probably far less than a system-on-a-chip running an OS and displaying the same picture on a monitor all day.
How do you charge for a service contract on a sticker?
This guy B2Bs. Y’all think companies aim for efficiency when their client is a megacorp? Heeelllll no. Corporations bleed each other out, too.
But what about yet another bright light in someone’s face? Do you not want another bright light in someone’s face? Everyone loves bright lights in someone’s face!
I’d argue that a custom board is more wasteful since they are single use. Using a cheapo COTS processor that drives a single display and runs Linux is reusable in the long run.
True, such a low number of production units design would really only make sense if you could find an off the shelf solution to drive multiple displays.
If these displays are not supposed to be animated and they’re reasonably low resolution (say, 800x600 20bit RGB or less), they could be connected via SPI and pretty much every microcontroller out there has multiple SPI ports, so even a cheap SBC would work for that). However I expect that getting XWindows or Wayland in Linux to work with such displays would be a PITA.
I’ve only ever got software running under Linux to control a tiny 2-tone display via I2C - on an Orange Pi SBC - and it’s totally its own thing which happens to be running under Linux sending low-level commands via the I2C dev and not at all integrated with X-Windows or Wayland. This would also work fine if the comms was via SPI (in fact the code barelly changes since I’m using a library that does most of the low-level work for me).
To just display a static image or a sequence of static images loaded from storage in a bunch of screens low-resolution enough to support SPI (so 800x600 or less) I expect something like that would be fine.
The more I think about it, there more I expect this thing could run on a single $50 SBC as long as the connector exposes at least an SPI device and 8 independent I/O lines (given how SPI works, shared SPI bus is fine with one separate Chip Select line for each screen as long as the SPI device under Linux can run on a mode that lets your code control the CS line itself, and the other 4 I/O lines are for touch detection) assuming touch position is irrelevant.
My local gas station now has screens on the pump. Not the big unit, but the part you put in your gastank. It shows shitty ads. Also in the Netherlands you can’t lock the gas pump, so you have to manually press it to get more fuel, so you are almost forced to watch shitty ads.
It’s exactly like this https://www.team-bhp.com/news/ads-fuel-dispenser-nozzle-havent-seen-anything
Oh yeah baby crash my bootloader!💕 Pump me full of bloatware and make my integers overflow🥵 I want you to leave my USB port dysfunctional for days and my ram displaced come on baby do it make me BSOD!!!😮💨🥵💕💦💦
This is better than the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs skit I watched the other day. Love it! 😂
Thank you, I had fun writing it
I hate to break ot to you, but this is a linux drink. All that will you’ll get is a kernel panic
why does a drink machine need a fucking screen
Murica. I bet toiletpaper has a screen, too.
This implies every drink and its display is handled by its own computer running linux. Potentially mtndew has a different IP than coca cola.
Internet of Slurp
I wonder if there is a refill cartridge with the flavour in it that the OS reads from to always display the right logo. Or maybe a touchscreen that the workers use to change it manually.
That’s no BIOS. That’s systemd.
I guess I’m the kind of person that can spot a systemd screen from across the room now
Blue Slurpee Of Death
Lol I think people are missing the BSOD reference
We’ve gone from SunnyD to SystemD.
…I’m sorry
In 2025 we boot a whole Linux system to display a logo.
Does it run Wayland? :P
a whole linux system isn’t even all that crazy. if it runs doom it can probably also run linux so probably everything from a potato to a dog’s left testicle can run linux.
Kind of discriminatory, what about the right??
The right potato will work just fine.
We’re not excluding that, it’s between the left testicle and the potato
That one runs BSD.
Dog’s right testicles are running Java
So that’s why it keeps swelling and needs constant purging of all that pus.
still windows
deleted by creator
I’ve never seen one of these, but I assume it performs other functions - surely monitoring sensors, probably reporting that data, maybe allowing triggering maintenance functions, etc.
That said, processing and storage is so cheap on this scale that it’s probably better (and cheaper) to go with a tried and true, widely supported system, than it is to optimize with custom hardware/firmware.
I assume it performs other functions
Advertising.
I’ve seen a very similar print out when installing/loading Arch for the first time.
I meant the machine itself! The print out is your typical systemd boot, though they’re usually covered by a distro splash but it can be disabled.
Wouldn’t be surprised if they ran animated splash.
Hell, wouldn’t be surprised if they started pushing ads through the screens.
I feel like that isn’t that far fetched, considering this machine probably has some sort of Internet connectivity so you can update the labels remotely and do other remote maintenance/monitoring tasks.
It uses Linux? That’s actually nice to see (but do you really need a full blown OS to show a logo?)
The thing that gets me is that they seem to have a separate machine for each display
easier to buy 10 rpis than a single embedded system with 10 diplay ports
Dont need remotely a full rpi for this. A pico or esp32 might do the trick.
This is being produced in relatively low numbers (thousands) , so software development is a factor. Just plopping a scripted browser in kiosk mode on Debian is cheaper than ESP32 UI development.
Idk, if they’re plugging in one for each screen it sounds like a lot; there are libraries to do most of this. It wpuld only take me about a month or someone competent a couple days to write this. I kbow there’s libraries to display, but i don’t know what else this is monitoring/controlling. So that seems safe,
So there’s a computer hardware cost that goes from ~5x(4?) Per machine to ~45x4 per machine. That’s ~ 2 hours of code per machine difference that this would make, assuming you were paying ~80/hr to write it, which is reasonable.
Even assuming no code was needed for the pi, production takes twice as long as expected, and electricity costs don’t matter (which, next to the condenser; they may not) you break even at ~16 machines. 20 if you want to throw in some other random arbitrary cost.
Even if you assune pi 0’s, at, what 20/each? You still break even before 100 units.
So it would take less than a hundred machines for smaller chips to pay off. I’d believe an exec didnt (even ask someone else to) do this math, but how long have pi’s had multiple video out’s?
For an Esp32 you’d need to take a larger model which has psram. With the Pi, yes a is take a zero (Zero 2w or so). The Pi already has hdmi on board and a graphics chip and accelerator, while for the ESP32 you’d need a custom solution.
The price difference is maybe 10 Dollars per piece or so. On the PI I have 512Mb of RAM and what ever SD they put in for storage. On the Esp32 I have 8 psram or so and a tiny bit of flash.
Ah right, for the ESP i probably need to wire up a sd card, custom board, all that stuff, to just store that 24bit 1024x768bit image.
Naah, while I love my ESPs and am just build a project with one - the PI is just so more competent for this task while still being damn cheap.
A decent Esp 32 board is around Eur 5, a. pi zero 2w around 20. Compute module proably similar - customer prices.
That’s a 15 Euro difference.
Ah and my developer pool who can code for Unix is a LOT bigger than the pool who have commercial experience for the Esp32.
I can’t follow your math, at 100 units the price difference is 100x15 for me, which is 1500.- About a day of developing for a small team, if the office and hardware is free. More if you pay for those, too.
When I calculate, custom development always is more expensive.
Idk, if they’re plugging in one for each screen it sounds like a lot; there are libraries to do most of this.
X11 can easily handle multiple screens.
Not sure about the Pi’s limitations but COTS SBCs can too.Can’t read the text in the image but i’m informed it’s a crash.
Which would mean that machine, or that virtual machine, is not on any of the other screens. Right?
I hope the machine is up to the job. I’d pack at least 64 gigs of RAM and a nice GPU.
That doesn’t sound like enough, need at least like 128gb for the ai chat bot that you ask to change the picture for you
I totally forgot about the necessity to put AI into them, I’m so sorry!
What about some blockchain to track the usage?
If AI can’t read my bank account history and generate an NFT of the Slurpee I can afford to finance, what’s the point?
At some point you realize that the slushee has melted in the face of your system’s 1000 W TDP…
That seems too low. What kind of low spec AI slush master 7000 are you using?
Yeah, modular systems. Buy 2, buy 20, setup time is roughly the same.
Every one of them is running a crypominer
At least the cooling is sufficient.
🤣🤣👏👏👏
👀 *could be running a cryptominer
*Should be running a cryptominer
Not just to show the logo, but to run the entire machine. Probably IoT enabled, so monitoring and maintenance actions and OTA are important enough that it’s worth having a very slim version of Linux on there instead of taking the security risk of building up from a lower level.
Probably there for “easily changing out logos of different flavor instead of using paper/plastic printout”
Sure but there’s a different machine for each display.
One crashed. The others didn’t.
Im very much a ‘hell, lets take it apart right here and figure out what’s going on’ kinda girl, but this is a sign that i never want to see the inside of that machine.
Depending on how much is linked up between them its entirely possible each machine is basically independent from each other and simply sharing the same casing. The advantage of this would be that even if one machine goes out or is having issues the other ones hopefully aren’t. I watch enough Bringus to know that shit under the hood for these commercial machines are fucking weird.
i’d imagine the company would make 2, 4, 6, 10 drink dispensing machines… having commodity hardware makes it super cheap to just have different shells and a power bus that you bolt electronics and mechanics onto in discrete parts
heck each individual controller could read an RFID tag embedded in the syrup and update its display automatically just from the inserted cartridge which would be PITA to do on a single machine
adding all the sensors for each, a display out for each… it’s really just way simpler to duplicate the hardware… honestly, good engineering
Seems insane to run multiple machines for something like this. I wonder if maybe it is virtualized under the hood and one VM went kaput or something?
Find me a cheap board with that many video out’s
I bet passing the butter seems like a pretty sweet robot gig right about now.
It’s likely a connected IoT device. Might simply have pinged for an open port due to bad setup and someone was trying to run an attack on it. Or maybe just a corrupted update file. Or a cosmic ray hit the ram or chipset and if just randomly crashed as a result.
Don’t over think a crashed computer. Just ask if anyone has tried turning it off and then on again.
They might also monitor the temperature and amount of slurpee left so they can notify employees to refill it
So working on ad machines before a lot of them connect to an external ftp site to pull down the latest version of the logo. Things like this you don’t care if it’s secure or not
Until it displays porn
I mean it would take a dns hijacking to do that and if some has control of your network work like that then you have bigger problems then using FTP
Then they get to watch porn while filling out their slurpee. Win win to me.
The computer controls the whole machine the logo part is a bonus. It also changes to like a do not use when Its not frozen or out of order.
Probably installed as a unit, computer with monitor. Perhaps a modifed version of a Linux OS?
How often do they change flavors that they need a full blown computer to show the logo, probably downloading it from a remote server, compared to just a backlighted sheet with a printed image?
Have you heard of this fantastic thing called advertising?
Not a blue screen… that’s maybe a kernel panic but can’t read it myself.
It’s failing storage, top half of the display is EXT4 complaining it can’t read the SD card, bottom half is the result of that, services can’t start.
My slurped machine needs an HD upgrade? But I just upgraded it dammit!
Anecdotally, a friend had a bunch of raspberry pis running inside specific devices, running hot, SDcards would eventually fail.
Started properly venting and cooling the pis… SDcards stopped failing (didn’t have to be MilitaryGrade™ either).
