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.
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.
That said, I have a screen on my desk being run by an ESP32 chip. It just pulls the image from a backend web server and redraws the screen. No full scale OS needed.
You can definitely do it with a microprocessor like that, after all, they’ve got a pretty good spec compared even to PCs of maybe a decade ago. I suspect they’re using a higher spec because it’s easier and more standard to deploy on.