11 ms·
Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is
by zbrozek 6y ago
Lots of folks here are talking about the latency and throughput, but nobody is amazed at what the robots are doing. Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Massive kudos to the manufacturing engineers who managed to pull that off.
- jccooper 6y agoI'm surprised they didn't design out stuff like tape. Although perhaps they did and the article actually means handling things like ribbon cables, which is super impressive, as humans can barely handle those.
- imglorp 6y agoReally. A dot of hot glue to hold a cable down must be easier.
- zbrozek 6y agoAll the manufacturing engineers I've talked to hate doing fluid dispense. Glue is in a class all its own because if you take the line down it tends to cure in the dispenser or nozzle.
- Qworg 6y agoFluids/moltens are a nightmare.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- _bxg1 6y agoThe PS4 officially supports replacing the internal hard drive, and that's not even getting into the question of repairs
- Pxtl 6y agoIf I could have one change to electronics manufacturing, it would be a ban on glue for non-waterproof devices. Most repair-hostile trend in history.
- ornornor 6y agoI took apart my PS4 Pro several times since I own it. It’s very easy to do, nothing is glued, and the plastic clips that hold the cover in place don’t break when you unsnap and snap them back. The only thing is an obnoxious warranty void sticker that delaminates if you don’t lift it carefully but even then I don’t think it’s legal to void the warranty with a sticker (Switzerland, bought from a EU retailer)
- beenBoutIT 6y agoYou can get replacement stickers for around $10 on eBay. Sadly the PS4 line looks a lot better with the stickers on as they hide exposed screws.
- zbrozek 6y agoMy guess is that they have flex cables (and not so much ribbons) and tape. Other electronic devices - including modern ones - that I've taken apart lately include quite a lot of both. There are three flexes in just this one iFixit photo of one side of a Switch Lite: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/sbTwHYTEZOaWX3IQ.full https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/sbTwHYTEZOaWX3IQ.f... Tape takes a number of forms. Holding down flexes to manage pull-out forces is pretty common. You can do that with traditional single-sided tape if you have the space on something to adhere it, but increasingly common is a double-sided tape on the flex itself. You peel off a liner and stick it down. It wouldn't surprise me if there are liner-less heat-activated tapes too, but I don't know of them myself. That's outside my domain.
- ehnto 6y agoI changed the board on my 3D printer today, the biggest hurdle was all the wire and plug manipulation. I play guitar, piano, type all day, you'd think I'd be good at it. It was like trying to pick up a grain of rice with two cucumbers.
- jschwartzi 6y agoWhen I work with this type of thing I use different kinds of tweezers (chip pullers, flat/round end, angled, etc). The ends of most FFC/FPCs are reinforced partly to provide good contact in their mating connector and also to make it easier to insert the cable with enough force without damaging it. The spiky-ended tweezers will damage an FFC though.
- falcolas 6y ago> Plugging in cables and putting down tape is fiddly and hard. Really? That's fascinating to me, given how accurate pick'n'place robots are. I would have thought they required similar capabilities.
- yladiz 6y agoI think it’s in part due to the pressure thresholds to put cables in, as too little pressure means the cable isn’t connected but too much could damage either the cable or thing it’s attaching to.
- ashtonkem 6y agoAlso chips are rigid bodies, while tape & ribbon is flexible and can push back and fold in unpredictable ways.
- ehnto 6y agoMaybe part of the success is in pre-packaging the wire and ribbon to act predictably, similar to how ribbons of surface mount components come on uniform tape reels instead of loosely in containers. You can crease or bend things to be predisposed to movement in certain directions.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoDon't you then 'just' use a ribbon with a plug & socket. PS4 is massive, size constraints can't be that tight?
- Pxtl 6y agoReminds me of an old matsci engineering prof I had "everything you need to know about mechanics is f=ma and you can't push on a rope".
- d-sc 6y agoThe robots are accurate, but the cables are not. Pick and place robots deal with uniformly sized parts that come in nice reels. Cables and tape are not as uniform and have a tendency to move in random directions.
- foxfired 6y agoThere is a interview of Elon Musk with MKBHD. He was precisely referring to this as being one of the issues when they were trying to automate the pipeline. The machines just couldn't plug a loose tube in its place. Maybe they should have consulted with Sony.
- sprafa 6y agoI think what Elon learnt from that experience is that manufacturing things is hard, and that building that knowhow and ability to both build and troubleshoot robot factories like this one is not something you do overnight, even if you hire the best engineers. Basically it’s unlike software and that might be where he stumbled.
- SkyMarshal 6y agoAndy Grove used to talk about this a lot - that manufacturing know-how does not come easily, and that continuous improvement and innovation in manufacturing depends on continuing to actually do it. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/andy-groves-warning-to-silicon-valley.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/andy-groves-warni...
- barrenko 6y agoThat man was something else.
- Retric 6y agoTesla tried it because the technology was mostly ready back then. The difference is a PlayStation has vastly fewer cables, far simpler routing, and problems can more easily be fixed. People can physically pick up a PlayStation diagnosis the problem and then put it back, try to do that with a car.
- baybal2 6y agoIs Tesla model S was made to be manufactured on a "lights out" line, it will look like their Cybertruck.
- agumonkey 6y agoI think Musk will be interested... this is touching the part he couldn't automate in his factories.
- vmception 6y agoI had invested in a semiconductor factory early last decade, and it had started making bitcoin miners, it had reminding me of Zion from the Matrix because it seemed like the first time that a machine could make another machine which could immediately start earning a negotiable asset and then transacting for resources. Very surreal to think about.
- AceJohnny2 6y agoThere was this little game I played on Linux years ago where you played an AI trying to reach singularity status while evading detection by humans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endgame:_Singularity Early in the game, you'd hack machines to run mechanical-turk style jobs to earn money. Later you'd build a factory to manufacture more processors... ;)
- vmception 6y agoHaha just a few years ahead of its time! Some of the first bitcoin faucets had captchas to “reduce spam”, as in prevent humans from getting too much free bitcoin, but really the captcha was a real captcha that a bot was stuck on, and was just paying humans to solve them to access some greater bounty
- lolbrels 6y agoI actually utilized an API that did just that in some automated software I wrote with a friend a few years ago. Was actually sort of interesting how it all worked with sending the captcha then checking for the solution string after the person had solved and inserting that back into the page before carrying on. Pretty sure at the time the cost was something like .013 cents per solve. I always wondered who the people sitting there doing that were or what their situation was.
- wallacoloo 6y agoMorally ambiguous, but I actually implemented exactly what you’re describing back when bitcoin was at $50-100. I found some service that would pay me $1 for every 1000 captchas I solved, and then I scraped that and built a BTC faucet site (I think I called it captchacoin.com, or captchabit.com) that would essentially pay the user $0.50 in BTC for each captcha they solved. It went from 0 captchas per day to 10000 captchas/day over the course of about a month with just word-of-mouth. Then the upstream service just quit paying me with no explanation. My accuracy rates were good. Maybe latency was high? I don’t know why they terminated it. But I struggled to keep the users while finding a replacement, and in the end I shut it down. On the one hand, I’m bummed, because that thing could have mostly run itself and made a tidy profit for someone still pursuing a degree. On the other hand... maybe it was for the best: 90% of captcha solving work is paid for by spammers who make the internet worse.
- andalusian_ipa 6y agoMassive kudos to the newly unemployed!
- usrusr 6y ago> I'm super impressed that they elected to automate those things based on cost merit. Seven years production run (or more), that should explain a lot. Even if hardware revisions changed significantly in that time (I wouldn't know) that's still a completely different calculation than something that changes annually, or even twice a year, as Sony's own Xperia phones used to.
- foobiekr 6y agoEvery discussion of highly-automated factories brings to mind this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSj6kvv7_Sg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSj6kvv7_Sg Early lights out production. The problem became obvious a little later, for NeXT, which was that these things only make sense at very high scale for products that change infrequently.
- 411111111111111 6y agothese boards werent consumer producs though. playstations are produced for years with no alterations.... millions of times. i.e. playstation 4 was sold ~100million times. thats most definitely at a scale where you can automate with margins.
- sbierwagen 6y agoGame console manufacturing definitely is low-mix compared to cars, but it's not like they're stamping out spoons: depending on how you count, there were something like 19 revisions to the PS3 motherboard, as Sony worked to reduce chip count and shrink PCB size: https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Motherboard_Revisions https://www.psdevwiki.com/ps3/Motherboard_Revisions
- Animats 6y agoExactly. Things built for vertical assembly, like the Sony Walkman and the Apple Macintosh IIci, are easy to assemble automatically. All the assembly moves are straight down. This has those annoying cable connectors that have to be slid in edgewise. Yet they got that to work. I'm amazed that Sony let out detailed pictures of the cable connecting operation. Looks like they use both a camera and a force feedback wrist.
- CobrastanJorji 6y agoCould you elaborate the cost merit thing? It was my main question and I couldn't find anything on it. How much do they save using robots instead of people to attach some cables? Is the benefit in failure ratio or do they actually expect to save some money by designing and building robots?
- Konohamaru 6y agoThis is only tangentially related, but the dictionary isn't helping me distinguish between these two concepts. In networking what is the difference between bandwidth and throughput, if there is a difference?
- zbrozek 6y agoDid you misread latency and throughput?
- Konohamaru 6y agoNo. I went to look up throughput in the dictionary and couldn't understand how it was different from bandwidth.
- wyldfire 6y agoThe other comment regarding latency/throughput is a good place to start because those can often be in contention. But bandwidth is not quite the same as throughput either, so I'll answer your question genuinely. Bandwidth typically refers to the actual channel capacity for a single link. Maybe that's your PCIe lane, your wifi channel or your HDRadio channel. The bandwidth is often measured as the spectral width of the channel in frequency. But those channels include some coding for error detection or compression. Ultimately what matters most is what kind of throughput the channel can deliver. This is the metric that is often measured in bytes or bits per second. A one gigabit Ethernet card is intended to deliver one gigabit/sec of throughput with the Ethernet channel coding. So if you hooked up a test device to your NIC it should be able to drive frames through an otherwise unoccupied channel at one gigabit/sec. But to keep the example interesting, end-users would generally measure throughput with all the added layers of coding and protocol provided by a network stack. The term "bandwidth" is much more nebulous when someone uses it to describe traffic spanning various buses and network media. I'd take context clues and assume that this usage of the term is somewhat like throughput. Though perhaps you could consider the independent physical channels as a single logical one and extrapolate some kind of conceptual bandwidth? Sorry, starting to ramble a bit at the end there but I think you may get the gist.
- raj_khare 6y agoThey must have played factorio over 3000 hours
- beenBoutIT 6y agoEven more impressive when you consider that the robot built PS4 is by far the easiest PS for a human to disassemble and reassemble by hand.