Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

asia.nikkei.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 284 posts

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

#191

Post by barrenko »

jbay808 wrote: post #100
actuator wrote: post #51

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.

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.

What does lights-off mean?

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

#192

Post by Rubayo »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #119
hobofan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 cont…

Funny you should bring up this example.

I have two Crucial BX500 SSDs here.

One made in Thailand - The 960GB version.

One made in Mexico - The 1TB version.

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

#193

Post by blackrock »

mkroman wrote: post #121
duxup wrote: post #40

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.

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=…

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.

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

#194

Post by jonny_eh »

belltaco wrote: post #143
pstrateman wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called lights out cause the machines don't need lights, so why pay for them?

Is that true for computer vision based robots? Or do they use lidar or something?

An LED lamp should be sufficient.

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

#195

Post by blackrock »

foxfired wrote: post #79
zbrozek wrote: post #45

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.

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.

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.

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

#196

Post by foobiekr »

nitrogen wrote: post #162
foobiekr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 you…

NeXT was very early. That was 1987 or so.

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

#197

Post by jfim »

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #119
hobofan wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 cont…

> 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.

Minor point on this great post, it would actually be 0.01% instead of 0.05%, because the amount in each country is divided by 5x, but the GDP is also increased 5x, for a 25x percentage decrease.

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

#198

Post by nickff »

barrenko wrote: post #191
jbay808 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does lights-off mean?

It means there are no people involved in the assembly process; you can run the manufacturing line with the 'lights off'.

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

barrenko wrote: post #191
jbay808 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What does lights-off mean?

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by monocasa »

krasin wrote: post #177
sbierwagen wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Game 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

Specifically, in the context of assembly, as long as dimensions and locations of each connector stay the same, it does not really matter for the automated assembly line.

They made changes to the case, board, and connectors.
Post reply on HN