Re:Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend
by TheOtherHobbes on Monday October 03, 2016 @09:32AM
(#12627300)
You can certainly do it with an RPi - although you might have to keep rebooting it every hour or so. :)
GPS and 3G/4G are trivial add-ons. There are stacks for mobile data.
RFID doesn't have the reliable range, so that won't work as a solution.
It's not really a hard problem for a competent small engineering team with a mix of embedded hardware and software skills. It's not quite a trivial problem, because there are some interesting edge cases, mostly when a bus is diverted. But there is absolutely zero rocket science required.
You could hack something unreliable together in a weekend, but it would take up to six months to get all the bugs out, do the production engineering for a bullet-proof solution, standardise the installation process (if retrofitted), and so on.
Double that if management is poor. :)
Those last parts often get forgotten in software. Hacking something together that kind of works if you don't look at it with a visible frown is hobby coding, not engineering. Engineering is the boring work that happens after that, to build something with a quantifiable many-9s uptime that meets or exceeds a standard spec with comprehensive test cases.
GPS and 3G/4G are trivial add-ons. There are stacks for mobile data.
RFID doesn't have the reliable range, so that won't work as a solution.
It's not really a hard problem for a competent small engineering team with a mix of embedded hardware and software skills. It's not quite a trivial problem, because there are some interesting edge cases, mostly when a bus is diverted. But there is absolutely zero rocket science required.
You could hack something unreliable together in a weekend, but it would take up to six months to get all the bugs out, do the production engineering for a bullet-proof solution, standardise the installation process (if retrofitted), and so on.
Double that if management is poor. :)
Those last parts often get forgotten in software. Hacking something together that kind of works if you don't look at it with a visible frown is hobby coding, not engineering. Engineering is the boring work that happens after that, to build something with a quantifiable many-9s uptime that meets or exceeds a standard spec with comprehensive test cases.