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.
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.