Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Companies/PlayStation-s-secret-weapon-a-nearly-all-automated-factory

by gumby • 6 years ago

428 272 6 years ago

asia.nikkei.com

throwaway888abc• 6 years ago

Impressive

latch• 6 years ago

In case anyone misses the link in the article, they have a graphic-rich version:

https://vdata.nikkei.com/en/newsgraphics/sony-playstation/

(The content is different, though both articles cover the same topic. A bit weird)

HenryKissinger• 6 years ago

"The PS looks impressive."

whywhywhywhy2• 6 years ago

This article is crying out for GIFs, great pictures but you can't hype me up about how these robots move and not show me.

nullc• 6 years ago

Thanks, the link on that page wouldn't do anything for me.

chinathrow• 6 years ago

More graphics directly at https://vdata.nikkei.com/en/newsgraphics/sony-playstation/

vmception5• 6 years ago

That's a great sub-site. This is such a good year for exclusives! 2020 was always going to be epic for that, and I haven't been disappointed.

blakesterz• 6 years ago

"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• 6 years 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?

tgb• 6 years 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.

tbrock• 6 years 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• 6 years 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-son...

TacoSteemers• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

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

chrisseaton• 6 years 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.

lm2s• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

Journalist innumeracy.

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

colinmhayes• 6 years 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.

jasonwatkinspdx• 6 years ago

It's not clear if the journalist understood throughput vs latency.

But more fundamentally: factories often have more than one line.

LeifCarrotson3• 6 years 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-3937...

ksk• 6 years ago

Thanks for your insight. Out of curiosity, why don't more of such production lines have dedicated machines that each do one small/simple action and then send it to the next one. It seems many seem to deploy general purpose robots that mimic human hand/arm features (that I would imagine have a higher latency cost in terms of controlling,positioning,etc). Is it so that you can manufacture multiple products with different assembly steps?

I work in automation, but of biological processes (vaccines) and we have the same production issues with bottlenecks/capacity planning/down-time mitigation, etc.

NovemberWhiskey• 6 years ago

The line is bottlenecked by the slowest process.

I visited the BMW factory in Munich back in 2015; at the time it was manufacturing mostly the 3-series models (not sure now).

It was a generally fascinating experience; the most interesting piece of trivia was that, when scheduling the build order, they try very hard to avoid putting station wagons ('Touring' model) back-to-back.

This was because the build-time of the rear-window assembly on the station wagon took significantly longer than other models due to the rear wiper, and that you would get a literal pipeline stall if you had to do too many together.

blackrock3• 6 years ago

Can you, or someone else, share your experience in becoming a Controls Engineer?

Is your educational background in Mechanical Engineering or Electrical Engineering?

I’ve always found programming robots to be fascinating. And especially when building a robot to build other robots. I’m sure others will be interested in learning of this as well.

rusk12• 6 years ago

God I love my PS4 - it has to be the peak of this class of machine. I can't imagine how it could be improved upon without going beyond the "box under the telly format". Incredible piece of machinery. I can't imagine the PS5 will be much more than an upgrade.

In my opinion the second best console is the PS2. I love Nintendo but they're more like toys than hard core gaming and entertainment machines. PS2 up until PS4 was pretty much the pinnacle, but I think the way PS4 improved upon it is the development platform, and the online experience (which even so does require some improvement). I still play games on the PS2 from time to time and they still feel viable as offline single-player experiences and I could imagine development for the PS4 could continue for 20 years or so and still be producing great and relevant games.

Where to from here? VR is one obvious route but may I suggest a HN-friendly alternative? Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves? I think in order for this to be viable in terms of protecting the profitability and stability of the ecosystem there are some business and technical challenges but I would love to see them take this direction. They've dabbled before with the Yaroze system and Playstation Linux … both had their business operational issues but hardly insurmountable?

EDIT - can't respond below any more so I just have "one more thing" to say:

PS4 is famous for being the cheapest sony home console relatively speaking

and what exactly is the problem with that? This is a feature not a bug. The PS3 was a novel system with exotic hardware but it suffered from some very serious flaws. It's reliance on proprietary technologies meant it was harder for developers to work with. It never took off as a result and is little more than a footnote in the lineage's history. A learning experience if you will.

Surely an extension of making something easier for professional developers to get to grips with is making something that hobby developers (and other classes of creative) can get to grips with?

ThomW2• 6 years ago

I can't imagine how it could be improved upon...

When my PS4 Pro is playing stuff like TLOU2, it sounds like it's going to start hovering off my TV cabinet.

azuriten• 6 years ago

When my PS4 Pro is playing stuff like TLOU2, it sounds like it's going to start hovering off my TV cabinet.

I have the CUH-7200 PS4 Pro model which is apparently the quietest model and it's insane how loud that thing gets when I played TLOU2.

The copying times for updates/patches is equally bad with downloading taking a few minutes and copying times taking more than 20mins. There's clearly alot of room for improvement - At least Sony have realised this as the PS5 will have a SSD instead of a HDD.

LeonM• 6 years ago

Is that a quirk of the 'pro' version?

I have read many complaints online of people calling the PS4 noisy. I have a PS4 slim, and it is very quiet, the optical drive is by far the loudest part of the machine.

underbluewaters• 6 years ago

I ended up buying the standard PS4 6 months ago because I had less than fond memories of the noise my first-gen PS3 made. I don't have a 4k television so it seemed like a good decision even though a Pro would have been nearly the same price.

The newest PS4 slim is silent and TLOU2 graphics are still incredible.

crtasm• 6 years ago

Does cleaning out any dust etc. that's built up inside make any difference?

pphysch2• 6 years ago

Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves?

We could even call these novel x86 devices "personal computers".

rusk12• 6 years ago

Yes! This is what I was driving at. Looping history back to the days of the C64, Amiga, Spectrum etc. where home tinkerers could make a massive contribution to the ecosystem. These were the gaming consoles of their day. Yes there were the NES and Atari 2600 but the popularity of something like the C64 is something that modern console vendors (especially at the PS4 price-point) should be falling over themselves for.

cbmuser4• 6 years ago

The PS4 is specifically not PC-compatible. It's a different x86-subarchitecture.

paulryanrogers• 6 years ago

Because of online cheating I doubt Sony will ever open up like they did for PlayStation Linux. My guess is they'll just clamp down harder to differentiate from PCs which can't deliver the same consistency. Of course the PCs openness is what breeds so much innovation.

sudosysgen• 6 years ago

Didn't Sony sell their PC division to JIP?

rusk12• 6 years ago

This is what I meant in terms of business/technical challenges.

tetraca3• 6 years ago

Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves?

The appeal of a console is that it's an appliance - you can just plug the thing in, not worry about any of the technicals, and go play games with minimal fuss. If you are an enthusiast of such things and inclined to tinker, I think making a Mini-ITX PC to stuff under your TV mostly effectively already covers this niche? You can pick out your parts to your liking, it will be small, it can run Linux, play VR, and be programmed and customized effectively to however much of your system you can grasp.

And Sony, who has spent like 80 years making locked down media formats for their consumer audio/video/gaming appliances that compete against industry standard formats, is unlikely to ever be the company that makes an open gaming platform.

rusk12• 6 years ago

C64 shipped something like 20 Million units over its lifetime. You could use it as a gaming machine (many did) - or you could go further if you wanted to. The appeal of consoles to many in the industry is that it was locked down and you could ringfence your revenue but that's not to say you couldn't address these issues with modern commonly available technologies like digital signing and cryptography. Basically like what Apple is trying to do but that could certainly be improved upon in terms of implementation.

pletsch3• 6 years ago

I love my PS4 but.. it's really slow. From turning on to getting in a party will take minutes, especially when loading the friends list and their profiles. Beyond this, getting everyone into the same lobby is also tedious due to host issues. I don't know if the Xbone has similar issues but I remember the 360 being able to sign in, be in a party with my friends in under 30 seconds and it just worked.

nxc18• 6 years ago

Xbox is better but still not as good as the Xbox 360 imo. In terms of software (excluding games), it feels like both consoles took a major step back this generation.

Aside: Voice controls got a lot worse with Cortana than what was available in the Kinect, not that anyone cares about that in 2020. ‘Xbox pause’ was magical in 2012. Universal search was better in Xbox 360, too.

I don’t know why they took such a major step backward with the new design, but everything got a lot more slow, clunky, and difficult to use. Made the whole thing feel like a downgrade.

efficax• 6 years ago

the ps4 is very fast (1.84 tflops, effectively a supercomputer 15 years ago).

what you're describing are network issues. the internet is slow!

easytiger• 6 years ago

it has to be the peak of this class of machine.

I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM

When i enter the notification quick tab it takes 30-40 seconds to show the message I've received, then another 10-15 to accept it.

Currently one single game, COD:MW consumes the entirety of the space on the device. From launch it wasn't ever going to be enough. You need to keep <x> space free because the update->patch->relink process needs to duplicate the game.

The menu system is also insane and makes no sense.

The PS4 Store App has to be one of the most poor implementations of something so simple i have ever seen. And despite enabling every level of security possible i still get DM spam that could be detected by a python 1 liner.

On the COD:MW lobby screen alone the console appears to turn into a 747 on take off.

Games are frame locked at 60fps - awful by PC standards and in a world of crossplay, a disadvantage. Performance limitations also limit FOV settings etc etc.

The controller battery life is terrible and it doesn't have bluetooth audio.

may I suggest a HN-friendly alternative? Hows about selling a more open system that allows end-users to tinker and contribute themselves?

Could call it a PC or something.

rusk12• 6 years ago

Yes there is room for improvement, but this is what I mean that these are further iterations on the same platform. The "Ghost in the Machine" however remains the same. Hard to see how that can be improved upon! The noise of the thing is crazy!

whywhywhywhy2• 6 years ago

I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM

Means nothing though, where is the software? These supposedly dated and under-powered machines are still where the production of some of humanities not only most ambitious art of the last 100 years but most profitable art is being produced.

forgingahead• 6 years ago

To be fair, Call of Duty games are notorious for their poor coding and design. I never have the issues with any other games that happens with COD. Not sure if it's an odd dev team, or if they really trying to wrangle performance out of the hardware that makes them do all these kooky things.

There's a very common complaint that COD requires double the game size free space to download updates, regardless of the update size itself. This is ridiculous and not something that is common to other games.

Tuna-Fish• 6 years ago

I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM

They really, really didn't. And still don't. And won't for a good while yet.

Cell phones work in a power envelope that is basically 1/50th of what PS4 uses. Assuming that power consumption/unit of work done drops by half every two years (and it doesn't), it would take a decade for a PS4 in a cell phone power envelope to become feasible.

The very newest cell phones have GPUs with more raw compute power than the PS4, however they still typically have less than half the memory bandwidth, and that raw compute power is only usable for very short bursts.

imtringued3• 6 years ago

I'm sure phones had better GPUs 3-4 years ago than the PS4, and more RAM

I'd like to see that phone. The PS4 was slightly weaker than my AMD 7870 at the time. If I could get the performance of a 7870 on a laptop without a discrete GPU that would be amazing.

Turns out it's grim. Even a snapdragon 855 doesn't even reach a single TFLOP... [0] If you want to wait until the end of July you can get a phone that breaks the first TFLOP (snapdragon 865)

Meanwhile the ancient 7870 had 2.56 TFLOPS (which is what I am equating the PS4 with). Twice the performance of the unreleased snapdragon.

Going from 4 years ago to a GPU that hasn't even been released yet not even scratching the performance of a PS4 turns your entire comment into a big disappointment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Qualcomm_Snapdragon_sy...

tossiojdsa• 6 years ago

it has to be the peak of this class of machine

Not even close, in fact PS4 is famous for being the cheapest sony home console relatively speaking. PS3 costed more and was sold with losses.

PS4 was made with very cheap hardware in mind, and the next generation seem to be committed to cheapness as well. For those prices a PC gets better hardware and well, it's also counts as a PC.

Even a PS4 Pro is weaker than a One X, and both are behind a cost effective PC. and most games don't even run at a 60 fps which used to be the case 2 generations ago. Worse than not running at 60 is stuttering, for most games 30 is more than enough, but when the console can't keep that rate it is annoying to see framerate drops.

manishsharan• 6 years ago

I love Nintendo but they're more like toys than hard core gaming

Some of us really love our toys. Playing MarioKart or Super Smash Bros. with my kid makes both of us happy. I used to have a PS2 and owned quite a collection of titles but I think playing Nintendo games is a joyous experience that PS2 and its titles never delivered.

monksy2• 6 years ago

I agree with you that I don't think the PS5 will be a major upgrade. It may be a hardware refresh but that's about it.

I think that you may be brining up a valid point we have a standards body to define the standards and labeling for the capacity of a gaming machine. (That would prevent games from always demanding the absolute latest hardware). However, a lot of the issues with the PS4 is you have sony trying to control _everything_ in the hen house. (Think of this like the Symbian vs Android situation) Android took off because it wasn't one manufacturer having control over the OS.

Sebb7672• 6 years ago

Android took off because it wasn't one manufacturer having control over the OS.

Yet iOS really started that market and maintains its customers exactly because it's a single company controlling the OS (and doing it rather well, to be fair). And while its market share isn't that of Android, it can hardly be called a failure.

motoboi• 6 years ago

You are probably missing the fact that PS4 became obsolete the same year it was launched and it couldn’t be otherwise.

They can’t change the console capabilities, because games would not take advantage of it, as a ps4 game need to run in all ps4 versions.

If you want to upgrade the hardware, you have to launch a new product, as they are doing with ps5.

It’s all about having a stable ecosystem which allows developers to spend hundred of millions and be sure to reach all ps4 users. And milk that cow for years.

The same will happen with ps5: incredible machine at launch, obsolete within 1 or 2 years, but will remain in the market as is for 7-8 years while development houses (and users) reap the benefits of the ecosystem.

outworlder3• 6 years ago

I can't imagine the PS5 will be much more than an upgrade

An upgrade is very much needed. Mobile phones are surpassing the current generation of consoles.

numpad0• 6 years ago

Sony’s PS architect/chief Kutaragi always had that kind of bright future thing, like “today we are sailing out on this new PlayStation platform and by the end of this decade the whole nation will be driven by this open machine and its groundbreaking processors doing every tasks beyond our imagination”.

And I thought he was full of it, and PS was always very obviously just another game console, and he’s also the culprit of why PS2 fat had IEEE1394, why PS2 compatibility sucks even against its own variants, why PS3 sucked in general, why there isn’t much gap to be perceived on the chart between launch day prices of PS3 and Wii, why there were some Cell based PCIe boards that were more or less space heaters, maybe also why Vita got RAM slash, also probably why Microsoft tried digital home hub concept in XB1 only to have the always funny division chief seek for new opportunities, and his absence is probably why PS4 and PS5 are just almost completely sane no nightmare gaming consoles...

Anyway Kutaragi was the PS guy from PS1 through PS3 and I guess that’s what you’re talking about.

rusk12• 6 years ago

No that’s not what I’m talking about but interesting info nonetheless!

imtringued3• 6 years ago

I agree. The PS2 is great. It's the bare minimum needed to achieve a good 3D experience. PS3 and PS4 are good because they add more horse power but the controller is almost the same and the single player games that can be created on these consoles are not that different from what was possible on the PS2. The PS3's strong points mostly revolve around online multiplayer.

partingshots• 6 years ago

A good baseline to measure how fast these are would be to look at comparative Xbox production times.

hobofan6• 6 years ago

If you enjoy that you will probably also enjoy the fully-automated Valve Steam Controller assembly line (including video)[0].

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2015/12/11/9890914/valves-steam-con...

bluejellybean• 6 years ago

This is a fantastic video, extremely well done in my opinion. I remember fanatically watching "How It's Made", in that show they focused on more run of the mill assembly lines for generic plastic things and usually there was a ton of labor involved. The video linked here was really the first time I saw this level of automation and my jaw nearly hit the floor, the technology industry has created some incredible feats of engineering.

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

Very few high end factories would allow some random journalists to poke around. Some candle factory is a different story I suppose. But you are right,I'd love them to visit some more modern shops.

phjesusthatguy3• 6 years ago

I watched How It's Made with my kids for a good number of years, and I was just amazed that the parts that were automated worked as well as they did. It made manufacturing look really complicated and that human hands were the most important part of the assembly line.

ekianjo• 6 years ago

It's not operating anymore though.

hobofan6• 6 years ago

Though there isn't any proof of that, I would assume that it has been repurposed for production of the Valve Index controller.

huseyinkeles• 6 years ago

Watched the video before reading the title and was thinking myself how it reminded me of Portal (a puzzle-platform game by Valve).

Thanks for posting this! Very entertaining to watch indeed :)

_bxg12• 6 years ago

Hah, they were even cheeky enough to put the Aperture logo on the robots

wnevets3• 6 years ago

that assembly line looked better than the controller.

mrlala2• 6 years ago

The controller completely serves it's purpose- replacement for a pure mouse control for non-controller native games.

Anyone thinking they should always use a steam controller over a 360 controller for pure controller didn't understand the point of it.

outworlder3• 6 years ago

Have you used it? It's pretty good.

bserge• 6 years ago

Amazing stuff. I imagine soon enough people will stop asking for "Made in [your own country]", and start asking for "Made by humans"

hobofan6• 6 years ago

You mean like the trend of "Artisan" products that's been going on (maybe ended already?) the last decade with Etsy and hipsters?

fomine32• 6 years ago

IIRC ASUS advertises video cards as "soldered by robot"

outworlder3• 6 years ago

Awesome video.

I got some Satisfactory vibes out of it.

Iv2• 6 years ago

Oh, they do the plastic injection by themselves? Makes sense I guess. Their rig is sexy.

duxup2• 6 years ago

I've always wondered if you could automate a sort of standard assembly system with a certain amount of adjustments within some parameters (device dimensions, how things are connected)... and pump out any number of different electronics all on the same assembly line / factory using the same robots?

Granted that probably already is a thing, or isn't for good reason.

bowmessage• 6 years ago

You should look into pick-and-place machines and other awesome fab robots.

duxup2• 6 years ago

I will do that thank you!

mkroman• 6 years ago

As you might imagine, this is already the case in places like Shenzhen - there's off the shelf “building blocks” for machines - not necessarily to any written standard, though. In this[1] Strange Parts video he mentions it. If you watch some of his other videos you'll start to notice that many of the machines actually look similar - I highly recommend watching them, they're great.

[1] https://youtu.be/PZBQzLfCKpw?t=1019

blackrock3• 6 years ago

That video was incredible. The machines that makes the product, the lithium ion battery for your iPhone, is this super intricate process, that outputs the final product. And everything is made from the raw materials.

Now, this is what I call a true fabrication process.

p_l• 6 years ago

If you give up maximum throughput for flexibility, it's indeed possible to do just that, and AFAIK that's how many factories are operated. There's also a mix and match where you have "subunits" that operate specific subsection of assembly line in specialized manner and provide general resources to multiple further areas (if you play Factorio, such subunits can be directly compared with Assemblers or Assemblers blocks in bigger production lines). An example of such a block cane be manufacture of pipes or PCBs.

zbrozek4• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

I'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• 6 years ago

Really. A dot of hot glue to hold a cable down must be easier.

zbrozek4• 6 years ago

My 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.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.

ehnto2• 6 years ago

I 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.

falcolas• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

I 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.

d-sc• 6 years ago

The 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.

contingencies2• 6 years ago

Pick 'n place are usually only XYZ fixed-envelope cartesian systems with additional part rotation about one axis. Sometimes the XY is replaced with dual rotary units (SCARA), or XYZ are replaced with delta systems. See https://www.valin.com/resources/articles/five-types-of-indus... for a good overview here. Plugging in cables requires fine and reliable gripping at two ends plus additional degrees of freedom, and a clear path through a more complex motion envelope for access. This generally necessitates a move to arms, which come with additional issues (play at extreme positions, repeatability constraints, higher cost, power and space requirements, non-square envelope, slower motion, etc.) Having two of these work together on a flexible part means very fiddly parallel control of two systems with these drawbacks. Basically it's expensive because good end effectors cost a lot, parallel control exceeds conventional industrial requirements, industrial control systems are purposefully non-standardized, sensors have to be added in an application-specific manner and subsystems prototyped as requirements are identified, and experienced talent is hard to find.

foxfired• 6 years ago

There 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• 6 years ago

I 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.

Retric• 6 years ago

Tesla 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.

blackrock3• 6 years ago

It sounds like an engineer can assemble or design another robot to do this specific task. Then you’d have to clamp down that loose tube afterwards.

Maybe with the AI vision recognition systems being developed now, that such a robot will become available in the future.

aahhahahaaa• 6 years ago

I imagine there are certain times where you end up redesigning the tube instead!

agumonkey• 6 years ago

I think Musk will be interested... this is touching the part he couldn't automate in his factories.

vmception5• 6 years ago

I 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.

AceJohnny23• 6 years ago

There 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

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... ;)

psychometry• 6 years ago

If the field of impact investing has an opposite, I'm sure that automated production of bitcoin miners is a part of it...

tasssko• 6 years ago

I always considered a machine backed conglomerate to be the next big thing.

vladTheInhaler• 6 years ago

There is a very interesting and creepy story about this called The Gig Economy [1]. Machines end up sending gig workers to do inane tasks, like photographing a certain building at a particular time, to take advantage of bizarre arbitrage opportunities too complicated for a human to notice. Eventually, everyone is just a peripheral of this enormous, inscrutable system skimming money off the real economy.

[1] https://zerohplovecraft.wordpress.com/2018/05/11/the-gig-eco...

andalusian_ipa• 6 years ago

Massive kudos to the newly unemployed!

usrusr• 6 years 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.

foobiekr2• 6 years ago

Every discussion of highly-automated factories brings to mind this: 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• 6 years ago

these 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.

nitrogen• 6 years ago

Years ago I worked for a company that had a PCB production line, and even for relatively low volumes (compared to consumer electronics) they used basically that exact process. The PCBs would be printed elsewhere and delivered in flat stacks, the boards would go through pick-and-place, solder bath, reflow, through-hole, wave solder, sometimes xray inspection, etc. Also had a tour of an Iomega plant when I was much younger with similar processes.

Not sure if NeXT was a pioneer in those techniques, but they seemed standard by the late 1990s and 2000s.

ironman1478• 6 years ago

Just wanna say I love this video. Thanks for posting this.

65102• 6 years ago

Fascinating, then the component shooting game moved to 200 000 cph (which is well over 9000) https://www.yamaha-motor-im.com/mounters/ysm40r

Animats2• 6 years ago

Exactly. 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.

Smoosh• 6 years ago

Apple Macintosh IIci

Insert meme "Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time"

But I still have one somewhere in a cupboard.

CobrastanJorji2• 6 years ago

Could 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?

Konohamaru2• 6 years ago

This 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?

zbrozek4• 6 years ago

Did you misread latency and throughput?

wyldfire• 6 years ago

The 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• 6 years ago

They must have played factorio over 3000 hours

beenBoutIT2• 6 years ago

Even 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.

actuator3• 6 years ago

This looks so amazing and I wasn't aware that Playstations are still manufactured in Sony's home country itself. I guess automation helps in keeping the manufacturing cost low.

Now I am intrigued about what high selling electronic devices are manufactured in their home country itself and not by the ODMs/CMs in countries with cheap labour like China.

hobofan6• 6 years ago

To me it's almost more surprising that with that high degree of automation they are not splitting the factory up into smaller ones and building them per-continent.

actuator3• 6 years ago

They will still need to ship the parts which depending on the part might be coming from SK/Taiwan/China but I guess they can still reap the benefit of probably reduced taxes because of local assembly.

jbob2000• 6 years ago

Electronics are fairly light, you probably don’t save much by shipping raw/incomplete products to the consuming country for final assembly. It’s not like soft drinks, where you want to bottle them close to the point of consumption so you aren’t shipping the dead weight of water around.

DavidPeiffer2• 6 years ago

I'm an industrial engineer, so I geek out about this type of stuff.

Shipping stuff is pretty cheap, but distributing the supply chain and creating multiple factories making the same product is incredibly expensive.

Let's say you have a hard drive supplier. Now rather than the supplier shipping to 1 factory, there are 5. Freight rates are going to be higher because you have a lower volume. Increased demand on one continent means you need the right balance of material going to that factory rather than simply upping the order for your single factory. Incorrect sales forecasts now mean you have inventory in Europe but need it in the US. You either need to pay to move it, try to get your suppliers to reroute things (always for a fee), or build finished units and ship them to the US, potentially facing higher tariffs than shipping in components [1]. Inventory costs are higher while you figure this all out, and you have increased logistics costs.

You're paying a (bigger) team of people to manage this, and expediting shipments as needed (likely at 3-10x normal cost depending on how expedited, market demand for shipping, etc).

Then there's product consistency. Even if you order identical equipment and keep all the same suppliers, you'll have different issues at each facility. Sharing best practices around the world is challengings and frequently done poorly. [2]

Then you have tariffs and government regulations. If you were 0.25% of GDP for a country, you can go to the government and lobby harder than if you're 0.05% of GDP in 5 different countries. [3]

-- [1] https://hts.usitc.gov/current offers some light trading if you want to find tariffs for the US. They're incredibly detailed, and the smallest difference could change from a 2% tariff to 60%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax is also interesting.

[2] I know of a distributed manufacturing setup where two "identical" factories have significantly different quality outputs. The best rationale they've come up with is a difference in altitude and climate.

Corporations who have distributed manufacturing like this often have a corporate team who travel between locations checking how well locations are adhering to the company defined best practices.

[3] Definitely don't discount this step! I've worked for 4 manufacturers professionally, and I know for a fact 3 of them have pushed for tariffs and exemptions from regulations. #4 likely did too, but I don't have a specific example in mind. In each case, the difference in profits were 7 or 8 digits long.

mytailorisrich2• 6 years ago

I have a feeling that automation slowed down in many sectors when China came "online". I think this cycle is coming to an end, and there is no comparable pool of labour anywhere in the world so that fully automated factories are going to be the next step (that wasn't technically possible in the early 90s but I think we now have the technology or very close to).

xvilka• 6 years ago

In fact China drives automation these days. And its speeding up everywhere.

PeterisP• 6 years ago

" there is no comparable pool of labour anywhere in the world " -> this is not fully true, as when wages in China started to rise, lots of labor offshoring moved to SE Asia (e.g. Vietnam) and there's still a lot of potential for the same to happen in various African countries.

walrus012• 6 years ago

I have a feeling that automation slowed down in many sectors when China came "online".

The largest high quality AC to DC power supply manufacturers used to all be Taiwanese companies. And they manufactured in Taiwan. At some point about twenty years ago with increasing wages, benefits and cost of living in Taiwan they started looking seriously at opening factories in mainland China and other places. Delta, for instance, has a big factory in a low-wage-area of Thailand. Now instead of going for full robotic automation and continuing to make power supplies in Taiwan, most of them are made by more manual labor intensive processes in places with much lower wages.

The top ten Taiwanese x86 motherboard manufacturers also did the same.

jbay808• 6 years ago

A motor company I know of makes their small-runs, specialty, and high performance motors in Japan and the rest in Indonesia. However they recently switched to a fully automated, lights-off factory in Japan to make their new product lines.

barrenko2• 6 years ago

What does lights-off mean?

dfox2• 6 years ago

Japan always had its “peculiar” approach to electronics manufacturing automation. While rest of the world tries very hard do design out any kind of “fiddly” steps, Japanese manufacturers got very good at automating such things. Just look at any kind of Japanese home AV gear with its typical large single sided boards full of obviously robot placed jumper links and thru hole components.

enchiridion2• 6 years ago

A piece of wisdom I decided to follow recently. If you are entering a new hobby, buy Japanese for the best value/price ratio.

Served me well when buying a guitar and amp.

Can anyone else support this? Does the type of manufacturing outlined above play an important role?

cbmuser4• 6 years ago

PlayStations are manufactured by different companies.

Some are made by Sony EMCS, some by Foxconn and so on. Whether the PlayStation company let's them manufacture by one of Sony's own OEMs or a third party company is usually a matter of which OEM has the best offer.

Sony normally uses their own OEMs for the first batches, for low-volume products and for domestic products.

rodgerd• 6 years ago

Cameras. There's a split within (the dwindling pool of) camera manufacturers about what they'll build in Japan/Germany and what they'll outsource, and where they'll outsource it to.

So you have, say, Olympus designing some lenses, software, and bodies, outsourcing some lens design (probably to Sigma - it's something of a closely guarded secret, although it seems all the major camera companies outsource at least some of their lens designs), outsource some of their manufacturing to other countries, while some remains in Japan.

As to why, check out Yongnou's EF-mount 50/1.8 and 35/2 lenses and you'll see why Japanese manufacturers want to keep their designs as far away from China as they can.

actuator3• 6 years ago

This seems interesting. I checked and it seems Sigma makes everything in Japan. Amusingly enough all the well selling digital camera manufacturers(Fujifilm, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Olympus) are Japanese.

KaoruAoiShiho• 6 years ago

This is so cool, but how long till they automate the packaging too?

ashtonkem2• 6 years ago

At only 2 workers per line to package them, would it be worth it to automate that role? Seems like they might've min/maxed the automation already.

blaser-waffle2• 6 years ago

There is also some (if limited) utility in having someone on the line doing stuff, watching stuff, and serving as a form of QC. You can hang in the control room watching the latest, greatest SCADA software run things, but it's useful to have some eyes-on as the line runs.

jariel• 6 years ago

Powerful example of operational innovation, and that there is so much untapped opportunity we are not leveraging in so many areas.

A company like Apple may not have the wherewithal or impetus to do something like this. When they need manufacturing, they are resigned to the traditional approach: China. Since labour is cheap there, and they just may not be thinking in these terms and may not have the wherewithal either ... the cost-effective solution invariable involves high labour intensity.

It may very well take factories like this to inspire other organisations to have the necessary 'Eureka!' moment to grasp that they too, might be better off 'fully automated' as well.

Note the eye-watering scale of the business however, quoted at nearly $100 Billion in sales, which is rather a lot of money indicating that it may take a product with a very long life cycle wherein there are considerable profits for this to be feasible.

Looking at this, one has to wonder why Western nations are not more keen to duplicate.

owenmarshall• 6 years ago

Note the eye-watering scale of the business however, quoted at nearly $100 Billion in sales, which is rather a lot of money indicating that it may take a product with a very long life cycle wherein there are considerable profits for this to be feasible.

You mention Apple. The iPhone SE 2 is basically "iPhone 11 guts in an iPhone 8 shell" – and as I understand it Apple went to software to handle things like the camera so they could keep the older generation optics and not change the body. That type of tick/tock cadence would support this nicely.

taytus2• 6 years ago

Nah. They are killing it because of amazing exclusives. That's all.

KorfmannArno2• 6 years ago

Aha, color me confused. Which would be those?

taytus2• 6 years ago

The Last of Us, Uncharted, God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn

hinkley• 6 years ago

Also the origin story for the Portal games.

baybal24• 6 years ago

Fully automated assembly lines rarely make sense economically even in Europe, and Japan.

A "lights out" factory needs a really expensive, complex widget to make, but one which doesn't vary, or change over time much.

Game consoles are exactly like: long product life times, and can be engineered specifically with automated lines in mind, without compromises.

Robotic factories are by no means a final solution for manufacturing.

arcticfox• 6 years ago

Robotic factories are by no means a final solution for manufacturing.

Robotic factories are by no means a final solution for manufacturing...Yet

zanny2• 6 years ago

Definitionally they kind of are inevitably the final solution. We will either totally automate all production, go extinct, or get trapped in a loop of destroying civilization putting the survivors back to pre-industry and having to rebuild in perpetuity. Its only a question of time scales.

walrus012• 6 years ago

A game console is also a fairly simple thing since everything is on one fully-integrated motherboard. Boiling it down to the essence it's a robotic process of inserting an already-fabricated ready to go board into a plastic case. Or two boards if you count the 110-240VAC input power supply to DC module which is in an xbox one or PS4.

nabilhat• 6 years ago

It really helps make sense when automation is a sibling product line or you're able to partner with an automation business. Given the detailed pictures of the assembly line for a critical product at launch, I'm suspecting that automation R&D and presentation is a factor here.

mywittyname• 6 years ago

Sony is also a huge company who can leverage experience from this across several markets. It certainly makes more financial sense to use the playstation budget to make this happen rather than start with one of their bluray players.

shmerl2• 6 years ago

When will Sony start supporting Vulkan on PS?

bigcheesegs• 6 years ago

I seriously doubt it. The PS4 has a custom graphics API which directly creates command buffers in the GPUs native format. There's not really much of a graphics driver at all other than what's necessary to isolate the game from the OS.

shmerl2• 6 years ago

Why not though? It makes it easier for developers, instead of the need to address yet another proprietary API. Simplifying things has value.

That API was created by Sony when something like Vulkan didn't exist yet, but today there is no good reason not to support Vulkan.

65102• 6 years ago

nice video

dschuetz• 6 years ago

That indeed is impressive.

mips_avatar• 6 years ago

I'm so fascinated by lights out "autofac" manufacturing. Instead of amazon warehouses along I-90 let's just have "autofac" clusters that can make most anything.

everseason• 6 years ago

So why do most of the PS4s I find on ebay all say "Made in China"? Are the parts made in China and then assembled in Japan at the Kisarazu plant? Or are they only making PS4 units in Japan for the domestic Japanese market...and making the rest of the world's units in China?

tanilama• 6 years ago

I guess only a certain fraction of it is made in this factory and possibly just to Japan's domestic market.

cbmuser4• 6 years ago

Sony uses multiple OEMs, including Sony EMCS in Japan and Foxconn in China.

Usually, the first batches of a Sony product are made in Japan or the ones sold domestically.

If you buy an early PlayStation 1, 2, 3 or 4 in Japan, they're usually all Made in Japan.

impalallama• 6 years ago

I wonder if this speaker to its nature of being a Japanese article but the tone is largely awe and pride of the accomplishment lacking the usual fear of automation and jobs lost I see in other such articles.

“If you keep watching them long enough, they will start to look like humans,” said one engineer. The look in his eye is gentle like a father watching over his children. Unlike large robots that lift heavy items, the delicate movements of compact robots resemble those of human arms and have surprising warmth.

smoe2• 6 years ago

I don't know if it is just cliche, but I have heard that Japanese people have a very different relationship to robots/automatization than western countries.

Were we immediatly think Skynet, they see something that helps them.

fomine32• 6 years ago

I'm doraemon

zanny2• 6 years ago

Loyalty to the group - family, workplace, country - is huge in Japan. The expectation is that those who are no longer productive for society will still be taken care of, by family, prior workplace, or society. And then the US is on the opposite end where you are largely treated as on your own where you find the most hostility to automation.

smoe2• 6 years ago

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.

Maybe I'm just ignorant, but, especially the first task, seems rather trivial compared to what they achieved with their robots? Even the second one, If I remember correctly Amazon does/did this manually because every single package is different and no robot flexible enough, but I assume in Sonys case packages are all exactly the same. Doesn't sound a whole lot harder than plugging in the cables.

So why wouldn't they automatize those steps as well?

946789987649• 6 years ago

Possibly cost factor? Hiring 4 non-skilled people may have been cheaper than adding the extra machinery.

aidenn0• 6 years ago

Loading into the sort of packaging used for electronics is definitely hard to automate. For low margin products it used to be universal that boxed items were manufactured where labor was cheap, and that's for very simple to load items.

Automation is improving at a rapid rate though. I've definitely seen automated boxers for some simple to load items start to show up.

enginoor• 6 years ago

If anyone is interested in factory automation I'm working on a site to catalog different processes. A good design can often be recycled into a similar machine.

https://automate.engineer/

I'm mostly building it for myself but I thought other people may enjoy.

strider12• 6 years ago

wonderful website, thanks for sharing!

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

Taking out the human element. China knows it's coming and it's a big reason they're "investing" in poor countries. They won't have the upper hand on cheap labor soon.

velox_io• 6 years ago

Electronics manufacturing has been moving to more and more automation for years. Humans don't place components on PCBs anymore (well, most components). it's done by machines that look more like a gatling gun than human arm. It's quite stunning how small the components are these days.

Gamers Nexus: How Motherboards Are Made (2019) | Taiwan Automated Factory Tour, ft. Gigabyte https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnAFTMaS5R0

Iv2• 6 years ago

I am happy that China reached the point where their average wage is high enough that we can finally resume the manufacturing automation effort that kinda stalled since the 90.

Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory

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