5 ms·

How Brompton Bicycle uses Raspberry Pi technology to improve production [video]

24 points by samwillis 4y ago

samwillis 4y ago
This is a really good video about how the accessibility of building automation with tools such as Raspberry Pi and Python is so much greater than people realise. This most interesting point it towards the end, this was built in-house by an employee, they didn't go out and bring in an automation consultancy, they used their own experience and enabled their own employees to build it. Transcript of relevant part: > The funny thing is, people too often jump for the consultant and to go find the 200 quid an hour amazing mega person. > But you have universities, you have young talent bubbling up, you have talent inside your own staff. > You have got to innovate. If all you do is just chuck money at consultants you're not going to be beating the competition. > You've got to come up with new ideas and suck ideas from different places. > And this is just one example where one of our staff unlocked huge potential in our organisation.
- m-ee 4y ago
  In my (limited) experience this type of thing is very common on the design side but much more rare in manufacturing. An arduino/raspberry pi lets an ME/EE with limited software skills get a lot of test automation done. Last big company I worked for had a large automation team where everyone did a lot of consultant managing and zero engineering. The culture clash was rough during design handoffs. They’d come back to design after their three station monstrosity with 8 motors, hundreds of pounds of steel, and 12 pneumatic lines was failing to do the one simple task it had been over designed for. Another more specific highlight was getting a quote of around $50k to add an ambient temp sensor to one station.
- pjc50 4y ago
  Yes to all of this. It's something British businesses have traditionally been bad at, recognizing and developing the skills and knowledge of their staff, but it looks like Brompton are setting an extremely good example here. I suspect they're also small enough that this kind of thing is easier to do without politicizing within the organisation; you can have individual line workers talk to the CEO. It's also an unusual corner of skilled "mass-custom" manufacture: rather than turning out millions of identical bikes, they turn out thousands of bikes to millions of slightly different specification combinations.
- enkrs 4y ago
  I have given talks to factory managers about finding that one or two employees that know Arduino/Raspberry for these projects. Every factory has such persons. They would love to do it! The reception on this is mostly neutral or negative from management. When you identify these guys, turns out they have great hardware or programming skills, but no integration or architecture concepts. The existing system (ERP, MES) owners also like to put a lot of red-tape around anything unconventional connecting to their systems. Managers also are held accountable for the project, even if the costs are low. They prefer to spend a lot and have a consultancy to blame on failure, then their internal employee project they selected. What consultants do is they help the company navigate within it's own bureaucracy and processes. Even to implement the Raspberry solution.
  - crispyambulance 4y ago
    I work in this area and know the mindset of ERP and MES folks. It's great for long-term volume production of stuff that's very well established, but makes innovation really, really intractable. That said, lots of people focus on how inexpensive things like the rpi are, but whether the unit costs $35 or $3500 makes a very small difference in the overall cost of the project. I am not totally against rpi's for factory stuff, as long as the folks who implement using those can slow their roll and think some more about the lifetime of their automation project and it's future maintenance. There are PLC's that can run FOR DECADES without problems in a factory environment. Will an arduino/rpi be able to do that? Will someone 15 years from now know even know what an rpi is or be able to buy one?
    - johnwalkr 4y ago
      I see so much stuff reinvented using raspberry pi, arduino and sparkfun sensors simply because people have exposure to those and don't know what a PLC is. And PLCs don't even have to be expensive, a $200 one from automation direct would often be enough.
      - sulcate 4y ago
        PLCs are often a pain to integrate with multiple systems and are not nearly as versatile and simple as an internet connected pi running python, for certain desired tasks. Please tell me which PLC you can get for $200 that runs python, can query some REST APIs, query and write to some databases, communicate with several other types of PLC and equipment, check a half dozen types of local sensors, and perform complex operations without purchasing a software subscription or having to be programmed in ladder logic. Obviously they are suitable to different tasks, but there's a reason someone might reach for a PI to integrate new functionality, including on top of an existing PLC. They're tremendously handy in this environment, not just used because people don't know better.
hosteur 4y ago
There is almost no content in this video. The company uses a raspberry pi to gather data/automate. Little actual detail or substance here.
- benj111 4y ago
  What do you want? It's a business video, it's focussing on the business side.
unxdfa 4y ago
I worry about this. It compromises the brand if they are willing to cheap out on automation hardware at this level. What else are they cheaping out on? Point being there's almost absolutely no reason why they should have used a raspberry Pi in this environment. They have poor power management, EMI resilience, terrible enclosures as a rule and are somewhat prone to fucking out spontaneously with things like SD corruption. Your warranty and service options are basically the trash can. If a station goes down, what happens to your line? The entire cost-benefit analysis is probably wrong here. If it were me I'd buy one of the cheap Lenovo industrial mini PCs and get 5y NBD warranty, actually tested Ubuntu support, without all the other issues and buy an extra one. They have the cash sitting around to do this properly. Incidentally also none of this is really special. We were doing exactly this with recycled PC desktops 25 years ago running stuff in VB6 on windows NT on much larger and higher revenue and audit-heavy engineering lines. The software is a separate issue. Buying that in is usually expensive and problem-ridden.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  What it shows is just one thing: that having a 'call for pricing' blurb on your website, which is pretty much the norm for anything beyond the most trivial industrial automation hardware is a showstopper for many people. They just want to solve their problem, preferably today but tomorrow will do. Not go through the endless filters-of-revenue-extraction that the regular industry purchase trajectory will subject you to. Exactly the same thing happened in the 80's with personal computers. Suddenly you didn't need to wait for the accounting department to write their purchase order after 'their' sales department had - reluctantly - come to an agreement with 'your' bean counters about what the budget was and how you were going to have to do with less of what you needed but more than what they really would have liked to give you. A RasPi fits within any discretionary spending budget, there likely isn't even a write-off on them, it's just booked as costs in the year it is expended. And associated bits and bobs for sensors and actuators will be bolted on as needed. In the end it may not be the best or the cheapest solution but "now" beats "someday" in many industries. I personally see this as exactly the reason why Brompton is the breakout success that it is: they show adaptability rather than to play by the book.
  - 4y ago
t344344 4y ago
I am really tired of how bad Raspberry Pi are. It is basically overpriced hobby board. I would not recommend building any sort of industrial solution on top. USB stack uses a lot of CPU, a lot hardware is missing and is software emulated. Some USB 1.1 keyboards do not work at all (2.0 are fine). Constant issues with power hungry peripherals. Unstable USB connections. WiFi has tiny antenna and is prone to interference... Software "support" is limited to some strange Debian version. Video playback acceleration works, but good luck dealing with outdated packages. I tried to use Pi for router, and included NetworkManager could not even handle WPA2 (only WPA1). No hardware acceleration for encryption, goodbye disk encryption or SSH... And it is bloody expensive, for 160 euro (4GB, PI 4), I can get much better x86 mini computer, that runs any mainstream distro, has way more stable hardware, and comparable power consumption. Pi 4 B has Broadcom BCM2711 CPU that is 28 nm...
- hdhrufjdi 4y ago
  > And it is bloody expensive, for 160 euro (4GB, PI 4), I can get much better x86 mini computer, Which one? Is it at least as power efficient idling and on full load? PS: PIs are usually a lot cheaper. You get 8gb for half the price usually. But it seems like you'd have to wait until later this year for such prices
  - t344344 4y ago
    Intel NUC Kit NUC7CJYHN Barebone (Celeron Dual Core-J4005) barebone is sold for 112 euro. Add RAM and SSD... > PS: PIs are usually a lot cheaper. No they are not. Maybe a few years ago. But PIs use obsolete processor, with limited manufacturing capacity. I do not believe they will get any cheaper any time soon.
    - hdhrufjdi 4y ago
      Yes, they are: https://geizhals.de/raspberry-pi-4-modell-b-a2301761.html https://geizhals.de/raspberry-pi-4-modell-b-a2301761.html 75€ until the end of 2021. Now 86€ as soon as there are new PIs available, note the 8gb model: https://www.berrybase.de/en/raspberry-pi-4-computer-modell-b-8gb-ram https://www.berrybase.de/en/raspberry-pi-4-computer-modell-b... New supply later this year: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-update-its-good-news/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-update-its-goo...
tqwhite 4y ago
This really makes me mad. The idea that you can buy a bunch of terminals and, Voila!!, you've got an awesome production control system is utter crap. I've worked on systems like this and it takes a LOT OF SOFTWARE to drive those Pi's. If those folks spent less that a hundred grand on that, I'm really sad about how badly they screwed their programmers. If they do not have full time staff supporting it, I'm really sad for their factory staff because the stuff is getting worse every day. The fantasy that software is a secondary consideration ("it cost pennies!!"), almost free is infuriating.
- abetusk 4y ago
  On the one hand, I totally agree. On the other, the project as described is well within reach of a small team (1-5 people) of programmers that could pull it off in 3-12 months for under $100k (maybe even closer to $10k-$20k). The way the guy was talking, it sounds like he had one of his employees who also happened to be studying CS whip up something that works while still paying base salary rates. If so, this means the owner got an insane deal by paying a full time programmer worth maybe $100k-$200k at a $30k rate. In the end, I think you're right. The guy probably got an insane deal because he convinced one of his employees to do free labor. I do wish projects like that weren't so expensive. I'll also point out that for a savvy owner who has some technical experience, this is also a very feasible (relatively cheap) project.
  - tqwhite 4y ago
    If I was buying this solution and you told me you would do it for $20k, I would not consider your proposal for one more minute. I have written things like this. A decently robust solution takes a lot more than that. If you are doing a burdened rate of $100/hour, that's 200 hours, five person weeks. That's barely enough time to get a working MVP, let alone test thoroughly and deploy. Let alone implement management tools to input the orders and the screens for the workers to access and update, let alone the reporting and archiving. Let alone maintenance and support. And, if you are paying $100/hour burdened, you are hiring people for $50/hour or less. Either you are hiring newbies, in that case, who is doing the design, or you found somebody desperate and are taking advantage. Which is to say, the assertion of 1-5, $10-20k makes me mad, too, as another form of devaluing the profession of software development. Nobody is "whipping up" something like this.
cbm-vic-20 4y ago
I love my Brompton; it was an awesome way to have a multi-modal commute back when I worked in the office.
- rowanajmarshall 4y ago
  I love mine too, but what really transformed everything was converting it to an electric bike (via the expensive-but-effective Swytch pack). Now I can easily go to-and-from work, or up a bigass hill, with zero sweat. It's wonderful.
aftbit 4y ago
Raspberry Pis are awesome. I would buy 5 for various personal projects right now, if they were in stock. It's not just post-COVID supply chain issues either. They have had several big gaps where they were basically unavailable, starting with the very first Pi 1. I would be very hesitant to build a business solution on them today given that I don't know where I would get more in the future.

24 points by samwillis 4y ago

This is a really good video about how the accessibility of building automation with tools such as Raspberry Pi and Python is so much greater than people realise. This most interesting point it towards the end, this was built in-house by an employee, they didn't go out and bring in an automation consultancy, they used their own experience and enabled their own employees to build it. Transcript of relevant part: > The funny thing is, people too often jump for the consultant and to go find the 200 quid an hour amazing mega person. > But you have universities, you have young talent bubbling up, you have talent inside your own staff. > You have got to innovate. If all you do is just chuck money at consultants you're not going to be beating the competition. > You've got to come up with new ideas and suck ideas from different places. > And this is just one example where one of our staff unlocked huge potential in our organisation.

m-ee 4y ago
In my (limited) experience this type of thing is very common on the design side but much more rare in manufacturing. An arduino/raspberry pi lets an ME/EE with limited software skills get a lot of test automation done. Last big company I worked for had a large automation team where everyone did a lot of consultant managing and zero engineering. The culture clash was rough during design handoffs. They’d come back to design after their three station monstrosity with 8 motors, hundreds of pounds of steel, and 12 pneumatic lines was failing to do the one simple task it had been over designed for. Another more specific highlight was getting a quote of around $50k to add an ambient temp sensor to one station.
pjc50 4y ago
Yes to all of this. It's something British businesses have traditionally been bad at, recognizing and developing the skills and knowledge of their staff, but it looks like Brompton are setting an extremely good example here. I suspect they're also small enough that this kind of thing is easier to do without politicizing within the organisation; you can have individual line workers talk to the CEO. It's also an unusual corner of skilled "mass-custom" manufacture: rather than turning out millions of identical bikes, they turn out thousands of bikes to millions of slightly different specification combinations.
enkrs 4y ago
I have given talks to factory managers about finding that one or two employees that know Arduino/Raspberry for these projects. Every factory has such persons. They would love to do it! The reception on this is mostly neutral or negative from management. When you identify these guys, turns out they have great hardware or programming skills, but no integration or architecture concepts. The existing system (ERP, MES) owners also like to put a lot of red-tape around anything unconventional connecting to their systems. Managers also are held accountable for the project, even if the costs are low. They prefer to spend a lot and have a consultancy to blame on failure, then their internal employee project they selected. What consultants do is they help the company navigate within it's own bureaucracy and processes. Even to implement the Raspberry solution.
- crispyambulance 4y ago
  I work in this area and know the mindset of ERP and MES folks. It's great for long-term volume production of stuff that's very well established, but makes innovation really, really intractable. That said, lots of people focus on how inexpensive things like the rpi are, but whether the unit costs $35 or $3500 makes a very small difference in the overall cost of the project. I am not totally against rpi's for factory stuff, as long as the folks who implement using those can slow their roll and think some more about the lifetime of their automation project and it's future maintenance. There are PLC's that can run FOR DECADES without problems in a factory environment. Will an arduino/rpi be able to do that? Will someone 15 years from now know even know what an rpi is or be able to buy one?
  - johnwalkr 4y ago
    I see so much stuff reinvented using raspberry pi, arduino and sparkfun sensors simply because people have exposure to those and don't know what a PLC is. And PLCs don't even have to be expensive, a $200 one from automation direct would often be enough.
    - sulcate 4y ago
      PLCs are often a pain to integrate with multiple systems and are not nearly as versatile and simple as an internet connected pi running python, for certain desired tasks. Please tell me which PLC you can get for $200 that runs python, can query some REST APIs, query and write to some databases, communicate with several other types of PLC and equipment, check a half dozen types of local sensors, and perform complex operations without purchasing a software subscription or having to be programmed in ladder logic. Obviously they are suitable to different tasks, but there's a reason someone might reach for a PI to integrate new functionality, including on top of an existing PLC. They're tremendously handy in this environment, not just used because people don't know better.

hosteur 4y ago

There is almost no content in this video. The company uses a raspberry pi to gather data/automate. Little actual detail or substance here.

benj111 4y ago
What do you want? It's a business video, it's focussing on the business side.

unxdfa 4y ago

I worry about this. It compromises the brand if they are willing to cheap out on automation hardware at this level. What else are they cheaping out on? Point being there's almost absolutely no reason why they should have used a raspberry Pi in this environment. They have poor power management, EMI resilience, terrible enclosures as a rule and are somewhat prone to fucking out spontaneously with things like SD corruption. Your warranty and service options are basically the trash can. If a station goes down, what happens to your line? The entire cost-benefit analysis is probably wrong here. If it were me I'd buy one of the cheap Lenovo industrial mini PCs and get 5y NBD warranty, actually tested Ubuntu support, without all the other issues and buy an extra one. They have the cash sitting around to do this properly. Incidentally also none of this is really special. We were doing exactly this with recycled PC desktops 25 years ago running stuff in VB6 on windows NT on much larger and higher revenue and audit-heavy engineering lines. The software is a separate issue. Buying that in is usually expensive and problem-ridden.

jacquesm 4y ago
What it shows is just one thing: that having a 'call for pricing' blurb on your website, which is pretty much the norm for anything beyond the most trivial industrial automation hardware is a showstopper for many people. They just want to solve their problem, preferably today but tomorrow will do. Not go through the endless filters-of-revenue-extraction that the regular industry purchase trajectory will subject you to. Exactly the same thing happened in the 80's with personal computers. Suddenly you didn't need to wait for the accounting department to write their purchase order after 'their' sales department had - reluctantly - come to an agreement with 'your' bean counters about what the budget was and how you were going to have to do with less of what you needed but more than what they really would have liked to give you. A RasPi fits within any discretionary spending budget, there likely isn't even a write-off on them, it's just booked as costs in the year it is expended. And associated bits and bobs for sensors and actuators will be bolted on as needed. In the end it may not be the best or the cheapest solution but "now" beats "someday" in many industries. I personally see this as exactly the reason why Brompton is the breakout success that it is: they show adaptability rather than to play by the book.
- 4y ago

t344344 4y ago

I am really tired of how bad Raspberry Pi are. It is basically overpriced hobby board. I would not recommend building any sort of industrial solution on top. USB stack uses a lot of CPU, a lot hardware is missing and is software emulated. Some USB 1.1 keyboards do not work at all (2.0 are fine). Constant issues with power hungry peripherals. Unstable USB connections. WiFi has tiny antenna and is prone to interference... Software "support" is limited to some strange Debian version. Video playback acceleration works, but good luck dealing with outdated packages. I tried to use Pi for router, and included NetworkManager could not even handle WPA2 (only WPA1). No hardware acceleration for encryption, goodbye disk encryption or SSH... And it is bloody expensive, for 160 euro (4GB, PI 4), I can get much better x86 mini computer, that runs any mainstream distro, has way more stable hardware, and comparable power consumption. Pi 4 B has Broadcom BCM2711 CPU that is 28 nm...

hdhrufjdi 4y ago
> And it is bloody expensive, for 160 euro (4GB, PI 4), I can get much better x86 mini computer, Which one? Is it at least as power efficient idling and on full load? PS: PIs are usually a lot cheaper. You get 8gb for half the price usually. But it seems like you'd have to wait until later this year for such prices
- t344344 4y ago
  Intel NUC Kit NUC7CJYHN Barebone (Celeron Dual Core-J4005) barebone is sold for 112 euro. Add RAM and SSD... > PS: PIs are usually a lot cheaper. No they are not. Maybe a few years ago. But PIs use obsolete processor, with limited manufacturing capacity. I do not believe they will get any cheaper any time soon.
  - hdhrufjdi 4y ago
    Yes, they are: https://geizhals.de/raspberry-pi-4-modell-b-a2301761.html https://geizhals.de/raspberry-pi-4-modell-b-a2301761.html 75€ until the end of 2021. Now 86€ as soon as there are new PIs available, note the 8gb model: https://www.berrybase.de/en/raspberry-pi-4-computer-modell-b-8gb-ram https://www.berrybase.de/en/raspberry-pi-4-computer-modell-b... New supply later this year: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-update-its-good-news/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/supply-chain-update-its-goo...

tqwhite 4y ago

This really makes me mad. The idea that you can buy a bunch of terminals and, Voila!!, you've got an awesome production control system is utter crap. I've worked on systems like this and it takes a LOT OF SOFTWARE to drive those Pi's. If those folks spent less that a hundred grand on that, I'm really sad about how badly they screwed their programmers. If they do not have full time staff supporting it, I'm really sad for their factory staff because the stuff is getting worse every day. The fantasy that software is a secondary consideration ("it cost pennies!!"), almost free is infuriating.

abetusk 4y ago
On the one hand, I totally agree. On the other, the project as described is well within reach of a small team (1-5 people) of programmers that could pull it off in 3-12 months for under $100k (maybe even closer to $10k-$20k). The way the guy was talking, it sounds like he had one of his employees who also happened to be studying CS whip up something that works while still paying base salary rates. If so, this means the owner got an insane deal by paying a full time programmer worth maybe $100k-$200k at a $30k rate. In the end, I think you're right. The guy probably got an insane deal because he convinced one of his employees to do free labor. I do wish projects like that weren't so expensive. I'll also point out that for a savvy owner who has some technical experience, this is also a very feasible (relatively cheap) project.
- tqwhite 4y ago
  If I was buying this solution and you told me you would do it for $20k, I would not consider your proposal for one more minute. I have written things like this. A decently robust solution takes a lot more than that. If you are doing a burdened rate of $100/hour, that's 200 hours, five person weeks. That's barely enough time to get a working MVP, let alone test thoroughly and deploy. Let alone implement management tools to input the orders and the screens for the workers to access and update, let alone the reporting and archiving. Let alone maintenance and support. And, if you are paying $100/hour burdened, you are hiring people for $50/hour or less. Either you are hiring newbies, in that case, who is doing the design, or you found somebody desperate and are taking advantage. Which is to say, the assertion of 1-5, $10-20k makes me mad, too, as another form of devaluing the profession of software development. Nobody is "whipping up" something like this.

cbm-vic-20 4y ago

I love my Brompton; it was an awesome way to have a multi-modal commute back when I worked in the office.

rowanajmarshall 4y ago
I love mine too, but what really transformed everything was converting it to an electric bike (via the expensive-but-effective Swytch pack). Now I can easily go to-and-from work, or up a bigass hill, with zero sweat. It's wonderful.

aftbit 4y ago

Raspberry Pis are awesome. I would buy 5 for various personal projects right now, if they were in stock. It's not just post-COVID supply chain issues either. They have had several big gaps where they were basically unavailable, starting with the very first Pi 1. I would be very hesitant to build a business solution on them today given that I don't know where I would get more in the future.