Product stopped working when data feed changed or broke — it has no remote update path. Not Recommended
I was given this product as a gift, it is a small departure board that displays National Rail train departures on a small screen. It relies on a public data feed (API) to function.
The price of this product has risen from £60 to nearly £100 in the last year.
Inside it's built around a Raspberry Pi, a screen of some sort and it is presented in a cheap looking 3D-printed case.
On 13th August 26 the data feed changed or broke and the board I have stopped working. Today on 15th Sept 26 the unit still does not work.
The business has advised on their own community Facebook group that there is no way to update the boards remotely, the only option offered is to post the whole unit back to be swapped out.
I could only find this offer mentioned in the business's Facebook community group, which has around 70 members — not on its website, its eBay listings, or its main Facebook page.
The company (which is not listed on Companies House and may be a side hustle) claims to have sold many hundreds of units of this product based on the article on the I Love Manchester dot com site.
This article states that these sales are both online and at local markets, however the replacement offer has only been broadcast to a relatively small audience (the Facebook community group).
This uninclusive approach to communicating the replacement offer may limit the number of their customers who are made aware of of it, and may consequently reduce their costs of dispatching replacement products.
This wasn't the first time boards have had to be sent back. On 2nd May 26 they invited a small number of customers to trial a new version of the board that supports London Underground departures. The only way to take advantage of this offer was to send the board back rather than any kind of remote update.
I also couldn't find a CE mark, a UKCA mark, or a serial number anywhere on the board or on its plain packaging. UKCA marking indicates that a product has been assessed as meeting UK safety, health, and environmental protection requirements before being sold in Great Britain.
In my experience these UKCA marks are usually attached to the product itself or at the very least the product packaging. It is worth noting that certification of individual components of a product does not mean the finished product itself is certified — that requires its own conformity assessment.
In my opinion, shipping a product like this with no obvious UKCA marks, no remote update path, and a hard dependency on an external data feed, was a shortsighted way to build it.
Limiting the communication of the replacement offer to a small portion of their customer base allows you to draw your own conclusions.
Remote updates for software-driven products such as this are today's standard. I'm aware of similar products, including at least one well-established competitor and hobbyist open source projects on GitHub, that do offer remote updates.
Any future change to the data feed could brick the product, and it would be the customer who would have the hassle of posting it back rather than getting a fix pushed out remotely.
The product does not seem future-proofed in this respect.
I do not recommend this product.