6 ms·

"The 31.4-meter line, completed in 2018, has the ability to churn out a new console every 30 seconds." That seems.... slow? I mean, I have no idea what I expec

"The 31.4-meter line, completed in 2018, has the ability to churn out a new console every 30 seconds." That seems.... slow? I mean, I have no idea what I expected, but 2 a minute, is that really fast for this type of manufacturing? How does that compare to Xbox or maybe iPhone output? I'm sure 2 a minute is really impressive, but I started reading that thinking something like hundreds or thousands an hour, I guess I was naive.

kaesar14 6y ago
I have to agree, if this ran all day it'd produce 2880 consoles. How do they keep up with launch demand that sees millions of units shipped in a span of a month or two?
- amznthrwaway 6y ago
  Factories have more than one line.
tgb 6y ago
Indeed, the lifetime sales of the PS2 were 155 million, which would take 147 years to produce at this rate. But the "graphical version" of the article that it links to says instead the following: > In this area of 31.4 meters by 6 meters, it takes just 30 seconds for a team of 32 robots to build a PS4. So presumably there is more than one PS4 going through the pipeline at once for more than 1 per 30 seconds.
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tbrock 6y ago
Surely there is a pipeline such that the 32 robots have 32 in flight at a time and don’t sit idle waiting for a single ps4 to complete.
- theandrewbailey 6y ago
  That's kind of implied by the images. But if only two completed units come out the end every minute (regardless of how long it takes an individual unit to be assembled), that does seem a little underwhelming. There has to be more manufacturing lines than just this one to move millions of PS4s every year. 525,600 minutes per year * 2 units/minute = 1,051,200 units per year (assuming 100% uptime) There has to be at least a dozen manufacturing lines to meet yearly demand of over 10 million. https://www.statista.com/statistics/222403/unit-sales-of-sonys-gaming-hardware-by-category/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/222403/unit-sales-of-son...
  - goda90 6y ago
    32 robots on the line. If each is always doing its job on a unit(because it's a pipeline), and a unit gets all 32 pieces done in 30 seconds, then each robot is spending about a second on its unit. That means a completed unit every second.
    - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
      I've programmed ABB, Epson, Denso, and Fanuc 6 axis robots (no Mitsubishis, but I've seen a few) and there's no way that those robots are running at 1-second cycle times. Maybe with a delta or SCARA, but just moving 200mm and back with the inertia of the robot alone will take you on the order of a second. It's almost certainly 30 seconds part-to-part, taking 16 minutes (minus 30 seconds for each of the stations that have two or more robots) from the start to the end of the line. It's not particularly important how long it takes from the start to the end of the line, and they'd be unlikely to share that trivia with a journalist - but part-to-part cycle time is important. If the TAKT time demanded a completed unit every second, they'd run multiple lines.
TacoSteemers 6y ago
I believe that number to be for just that length of factory line. The factory as a whole presumably has more production areas than just the one pictured. The other article, kindly linked in one of the replies, states the following: "In this area of 31.4 meters by 6 meters, it takes just 30 seconds for a team of 32 robots to build a PS4. "
dcsilver 6y ago
The line can assemble a unit in 30 seconds and will presumably have more than one on it at a time.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  What you're talking about is the latency - start to end for construction for each is 30 seconds. But what the article is talking about is the throughput - one finished very 30 seconds - doesn't mention how long each takes to make start to finish. A throughput of one every 30 seconds is only a million per year. They have sold 100 million PS4s.
  - eropple 6y ago
    For that single factory line. Consumer electronics factories often have a lot of lines in parallel.
    - neilpanchal 6y ago
      Yep, also minimum 2 lines to address SPOF (single point of failure). Just because one little thing went wrong, you don’t stop the entire production line. My guess is that they have 12+ parallel lines.
  - monkpit 6y ago
    We are also assuming that the article is worded correctly. It could very well mean that the assembly time for 1 unit is 30 seconds total from start to finish, and the wording is just inaccurate. It happens a lot with articles like this, so who knows. EDIT: another commenter points out that another version of the article does indeed say 30 seconds to complete one unit, as opposed to “one unit per 30 seconds”
    - ginko 6y ago
      >another commenter points out that another version of the article does indeed say 30 seconds to complete one unit, as opposed to “one unit per 30 seconds How would that even be possible? Also what's are the start and end state here? Just pure assembly? Surely printing the PCBs can't possibly take a fraction of 30s. Neither can placing and SMD soldering the components.
lm2s 6y ago
Yes it does seem slow, and being an assembly line I wonder if it's just poor communication in the news article. I'd think that 30 seconds would be how long 1 PlayStation takes to be assembled, but that there would be a new one every few seconds coming out of the line.
barrkel 6y ago
Journalist innumeracy. It's a pipeline. 30 seconds per build, but not 30 seconds between each console.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  There's no way they can build an entire one in just 30 seconds. It probably takes longer than that just to package them.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    Well, the packaging is done by humans.
    - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
      No, it isn't. The article specifically describes the robots packaging the final product.
      - niea_11 6y ago
        from the article : Just a few humans were present to deal with a handful of tasks -- two to feed bare motherboards to the line, and two to package the finished consoles.
      - JosephRedfern 6y ago
        It’s ambiguously worded (up to vs up to and including), but the article actually specifically describes humans packaging the final product: “Just a few humans were present to deal with a handful of tasks -- two to feed bare motherboards to the line, and two to package the finished consoles.“
jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago
It's not clear if the journalist understood throughput vs latency. But more fundamentally: factories often have more than one line.
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Controls engineer here - no, that's pretty normal. I'm accustomed to automotive work, but I believe the electronics assembly lines are similar. The flexible materials handling stuff (connecting flat flex cables? Applying Kapton tape?) is indeed super impressive, but the timing is ordinary. A sizeable 6-axis robot like those used here has a minimum cycle time of a second or two for the simplest possible "move in, place the thing, move out" operation. They're not ultralight delta or SCARA bots, they're about as fast as a human can control their arm. Also, there's a second or two lost while the pallets moves along and are parked at the multiple stations along the line, you want to design the system to maximize the ratio of useful on-station time to transition time. The line is bottlenecked by the slowest process. You can make a slow station run in parallel - as in the photo at [1] with the 16 stations arrayed around the robot - but that adds a lot of complexity. I'd assume that their requirements were to accommodate up to ~8 minutes for burn-in testing at that station, and that by the empty stations, the software guys ended up only using 4 minutes. You can't make the whole line wait that long, so you spend the extra effort and introduce extra complexity by buffering parts there, but now your process has forked and needs to be merged again - really a pain for tracking suspect parts or tools. All that matters is that you unload each pallet before it needs to move on and replace it with a completed part. Some stations may be doing nothing but running a 5 second electrical test. If there's some station that has to pick up a cable, photograph it, analyze it, contort it by rotating robot joints through large angles, plug it in, and get out of the way, that could easily take 10 seconds. Others may have a human who needs to keep up. Others might be heat-staking a plastic component and need time to blow on the stake until it cools enough to be unclamped. Others might have multi-headed tooling and can connect several different parts all at once. 30 seconds is a nice middling part-to-part value if you've got a few complex operations, a few human operations, and don't want heavy robots slinging your expensive parts around at high speed. I wouldn't have been surprised at a 10-second cycle time, but 30 seconds is still reasonable. A final consideration is that you don't want an entire factory dependent on a single line. If you want to produce thousands of parts an hour, it's much, much better to have 10 identical lines that work at a 30-second cycle time than a single line frenetically thrashing to put out out parts in 3 seconds. If one line goes down, you still have 90% capacity, and can probably catch back up. If your single line goes down, you're in big trouble. [1]: https://s3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/psh-ex-ftnikkei-3937bb4/images/2/1/7/9/28039712-10-eng-GB/Cropped-1593718166%E9%9B%BB%E5%AD%90%E7%89%88%E8%BF%BD%E5%8A%A0%EF%BC%89%E3%83%97%E3%83%AC%E3%82%B9%E3%83%86%E3%81%AE%E8%A3%8F%E5%81%B4%E3%80%81%E9%9B%BB%E5%AD%90%E7%89%88%E7%94%A8%E3%81%AE%E8%BF%BD%E5%8A%A0%E5%86%99%E7%9C%9F%E2%91%A320200703034521471_Data.jpg https://s3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/psh-ex-ftnikkei-3937...
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kaesar14 6y ago

I have to agree, if this ran all day it'd produce 2880 consoles. How do they keep up with launch demand that sees millions of units shipped in a span of a month or two?

amznthrwaway 6y ago
Factories have more than one line.

tgb 6y ago

Indeed, the lifetime sales of the PS2 were 155 million, which would take 147 years to produce at this rate. But the "graphical version" of the article that it links to says instead the following: > In this area of 31.4 meters by 6 meters, it takes just 30 seconds for a team of 32 robots to build a PS4. So presumably there is more than one PS4 going through the pipeline at once for more than 1 per 30 seconds.

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tbrock 6y ago

Surely there is a pipeline such that the 32 robots have 32 in flight at a time and don’t sit idle waiting for a single ps4 to complete.

theandrewbailey 6y ago
That's kind of implied by the images. But if only two completed units come out the end every minute (regardless of how long it takes an individual unit to be assembled), that does seem a little underwhelming. There has to be more manufacturing lines than just this one to move millions of PS4s every year. 525,600 minutes per year * 2 units/minute = 1,051,200 units per year (assuming 100% uptime) There has to be at least a dozen manufacturing lines to meet yearly demand of over 10 million. https://www.statista.com/statistics/222403/unit-sales-of-sonys-gaming-hardware-by-category/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/222403/unit-sales-of-son...
- goda90 6y ago
  32 robots on the line. If each is always doing its job on a unit(because it's a pipeline), and a unit gets all 32 pieces done in 30 seconds, then each robot is spending about a second on its unit. That means a completed unit every second.
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    I've programmed ABB, Epson, Denso, and Fanuc 6 axis robots (no Mitsubishis, but I've seen a few) and there's no way that those robots are running at 1-second cycle times. Maybe with a delta or SCARA, but just moving 200mm and back with the inertia of the robot alone will take you on the order of a second. It's almost certainly 30 seconds part-to-part, taking 16 minutes (minus 30 seconds for each of the stations that have two or more robots) from the start to the end of the line. It's not particularly important how long it takes from the start to the end of the line, and they'd be unlikely to share that trivia with a journalist - but part-to-part cycle time is important. If the TAKT time demanded a completed unit every second, they'd run multiple lines.

TacoSteemers 6y ago

I believe that number to be for just that length of factory line. The factory as a whole presumably has more production areas than just the one pictured. The other article, kindly linked in one of the replies, states the following: "In this area of 31.4 meters by 6 meters, it takes just 30 seconds for a team of 32 robots to build a PS4. "

dcsilver 6y ago

The line can assemble a unit in 30 seconds and will presumably have more than one on it at a time.

chrisseaton 6y ago
What you're talking about is the latency - start to end for construction for each is 30 seconds. But what the article is talking about is the throughput - one finished very 30 seconds - doesn't mention how long each takes to make start to finish. A throughput of one every 30 seconds is only a million per year. They have sold 100 million PS4s.
- eropple 6y ago
  For that single factory line. Consumer electronics factories often have a lot of lines in parallel.
  - neilpanchal 6y ago
    Yep, also minimum 2 lines to address SPOF (single point of failure). Just because one little thing went wrong, you don’t stop the entire production line. My guess is that they have 12+ parallel lines.
- monkpit 6y ago
  We are also assuming that the article is worded correctly. It could very well mean that the assembly time for 1 unit is 30 seconds total from start to finish, and the wording is just inaccurate. It happens a lot with articles like this, so who knows. EDIT: another commenter points out that another version of the article does indeed say 30 seconds to complete one unit, as opposed to “one unit per 30 seconds”
  - ginko 6y ago
    >another commenter points out that another version of the article does indeed say 30 seconds to complete one unit, as opposed to “one unit per 30 seconds How would that even be possible? Also what's are the start and end state here? Just pure assembly? Surely printing the PCBs can't possibly take a fraction of 30s. Neither can placing and SMD soldering the components.

lm2s 6y ago

Yes it does seem slow, and being an assembly line I wonder if it's just poor communication in the news article. I'd think that 30 seconds would be how long 1 PlayStation takes to be assembled, but that there would be a new one every few seconds coming out of the line.

barrkel 6y ago

Journalist innumeracy. It's a pipeline. 30 seconds per build, but not 30 seconds between each console.

colinmhayes 6y ago
There's no way they can build an entire one in just 30 seconds. It probably takes longer than that just to package them.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  Well, the packaging is done by humans.
  - CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    No, it isn't. The article specifically describes the robots packaging the final product.
    - niea_11 6y ago
      from the article : Just a few humans were present to deal with a handful of tasks -- two to feed bare motherboards to the line, and two to package the finished consoles.
    - JosephRedfern 6y ago
      It’s ambiguously worded (up to vs up to and including), but the article actually specifically describes humans packaging the final product: “Just a few humans were present to deal with a handful of tasks -- two to feed bare motherboards to the line, and two to package the finished consoles.“

jasonwatkinspdx 6y ago

It's not clear if the journalist understood throughput vs latency. But more fundamentally: factories often have more than one line.

LeifCarrotson 6y ago

Controls engineer here - no, that's pretty normal. I'm accustomed to automotive work, but I believe the electronics assembly lines are similar. The flexible materials handling stuff (connecting flat flex cables? Applying Kapton tape?) is indeed super impressive, but the timing is ordinary. A sizeable 6-axis robot like those used here has a minimum cycle time of a second or two for the simplest possible "move in, place the thing, move out" operation. They're not ultralight delta or SCARA bots, they're about as fast as a human can control their arm. Also, there's a second or two lost while the pallets moves along and are parked at the multiple stations along the line, you want to design the system to maximize the ratio of useful on-station time to transition time. The line is bottlenecked by the slowest process. You can make a slow station run in parallel - as in the photo at [1] with the 16 stations arrayed around the robot - but that adds a lot of complexity. I'd assume that their requirements were to accommodate up to ~8 minutes for burn-in testing at that station, and that by the empty stations, the software guys ended up only using 4 minutes. You can't make the whole line wait that long, so you spend the extra effort and introduce extra complexity by buffering parts there, but now your process has forked and needs to be merged again - really a pain for tracking suspect parts or tools. All that matters is that you unload each pallet before it needs to move on and replace it with a completed part. Some stations may be doing nothing but running a 5 second electrical test. If there's some station that has to pick up a cable, photograph it, analyze it, contort it by rotating robot joints through large angles, plug it in, and get out of the way, that could easily take 10 seconds. Others may have a human who needs to keep up. Others might be heat-staking a plastic component and need time to blow on the stake until it cools enough to be unclamped. Others might have multi-headed tooling and can connect several different parts all at once. 30 seconds is a nice middling part-to-part value if you've got a few complex operations, a few human operations, and don't want heavy robots slinging your expensive parts around at high speed. I wouldn't have been surprised at a 10-second cycle time, but 30 seconds is still reasonable. A final consideration is that you don't want an entire factory dependent on a single line. If you want to produce thousands of parts an hour, it's much, much better to have 10 identical lines that work at a 30-second cycle time than a single line frenetically thrashing to put out out parts in 3 seconds. If one line goes down, you still have 90% capacity, and can probably catch back up. If your single line goes down, you're in big trouble. [1]: https://s3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/psh-ex-ftnikkei-3937bb4/images/2/1/7/9/28039712-10-eng-GB/Cropped-1593718166%E9%9B%BB%E5%AD%90%E7%89%88%E8%BF%BD%E5%8A%A0%EF%BC%89%E3%83%97%E3%83%AC%E3%82%B9%E3%83%86%E3%81%AE%E8%A3%8F%E5%81%B4%E3%80%81%E9%9B%BB%E5%AD%90%E7%89%88%E7%94%A8%E3%81%AE%E8%BF%BD%E5%8A%A0%E5%86%99%E7%9C%9F%E2%91%A320200703034521471_Data.jpg https://s3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com/psh-ex-ftnikkei-3937...

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