Playstation's secret weapon: a nearly all-automated factory • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by baybal2 » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

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…

David, in my work in China, I often get surprising realisations like "this factory makes 90% of these widgets in the world" while the factory in question may look like a dusty shed. The "super-centralisation" phenomenons are all around.

People may think that simple, generic items may gravitate to competitive markets, but with modern manufacturing equipment, even very small factories can have sky high productivity.

At around 2014, I was working on arranging manufacturing for one netbook design, and I went to South China to pick suppliers for mechanical parts.

A company called RKX hinge was the biggest notebook, and cellphone hinge maker in the world with more than half of global market share. To my surprise, they did not have a website at the time, not even a sign on the door.

They were a small, 2 storey factory in Baoan, with an office on the factory floor, and "a warehouse space" made of dangerously tall pyramids of boxes in the corner of shop floor.

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

#222

Post by rusk » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:35 PM UTC

cosmodisk wrote: post #87

rusk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But realistically, how much extra would the end users be able to add? I understand those were great days and people could do a lot just by knowing where to soldier and etc. Not sure it'd work the same way tbh.

Creative tooling has come a long way in 40 years. We’ve got blender, unity, sketchup etc - even minecraft now that I think of it. I’m not talking about BASIC and assembly but basically opening up the platform for the development of this kind of tooling and charging to use it the same as they do gaming presently and controlling the distribution similarly

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

#223

Post by monkpit » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

ginko wrote: post #186

monkpit wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are also assuming that the article is worded correctly. It could very well mean that the assembly time for 1 unit is 30 seconds total from start to finish, and the wording is just inaccurate. It happens a lot with articles like this, so who knows. EDIT: another commenter points out that another version of the article does indeed say 30 seconds to complete one unit, as opposed to “one unit per 30 seconds”

>another commenter points out that another version of the article does indeed say 30 seconds to complete one unit, as opposed to “one unit per 30 seconds How would that even be possible? Also what's are the start and end state here? Just pure assembly? Surely printing the PCBs can't possibly take a fraction of 30s. Neither can placing and SMD soldering the components.

I assume it’s final assembly

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

#224

Post by contingencies » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

blackrock wrote: post #183

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, plac…

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.

Most of the available training for this stuff is vendor-specific, vendor-provided and really expensive to undertake. Indeed, many vendors have solution provider networks who will prefer to do this programming for you, because it is so unintuitive/dangerous/error-prone.

You can, however, learn the control systems by grabbing and reading the manuals. Look for manufacturers then seek out manuals. Many are online though they are often not the latest edition as some manufacturers now seek to keep this internal to paying customers.

All the systems I have seen use G-Code variants with manufacturer specific extensions. Many now offer GUIs to help with spatial planning, multi-machine integration, common code generation, etc. However, at the end of the day it is still nearly all about generating/writing/modifying/replaying stored G-Code.

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

#225

Post by rusk » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

phatfish wrote: post #166

rusk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The PS3 ran Linux at the beginning. That went nowhere for Sony apart from a lawsuit when it got patched out and consoles getting racked for cheap compute at the beginning. I don't remember the specifics apart from the GPU being inaccessible which just made it a PowerPC server. But i suspect that experience killed off the idea internally for quite a while. Maybe it would be a last resort if the Playstation does lose o…

There is no such thing as a failed experiment. It sucks to be the guys who lost out when Sony decided they didn’t want to support their Linux base any more but at that stage they’d gotten what they want out of it. Sony has a history of engaging with the hobbiest community in a tight and controlled manner and their’s no reason to think they might not bring this on another notch in a later generation. Albeit in a tight and controlled fashion, but just open enough to get engagement, as is their way.

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

#226

Post by rusk » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

cbmuser wrote: post #216

pphysch wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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".

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

It’s all about the APIs though. PS4 is very friendly towards porting from mainstream x86

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

#227

Post by rusk » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:55 PM UTC

tetraca wrote: post #188

rusk wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap and providing a long lived homogenous platform. Apple do this to a certain extent but not at the price point. You can customise with peripherals.

I would argue that the PC is (or will be) a longer lived platform, with homogenized interfaces that let it stay in the game far better than the C64 could dream of. My budget 8 year old PC - which initially had the cheapest CPU I could possibly buy for the socket - is able to handle itself admirably well, even on newest generation games because of how far progressive PC upgrades can carry things these days. Meanwhile,…

As you say:

> 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.

Also there was certainly a chasm in capability between the 386 and c64 but the games weren’t there and you would have had to spend a lot more. At that stage anyway we had Amiga which really wasn’t surpassed by PC architecture until maybe the late 90s

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

#228

Post by vladTheInhaler » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

vmception wrote: post #101

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.

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.

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...

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

#229

Post by DavidPeiffer » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 11:05 PM UTC

hobofan wrote: post #144

DavidPeiffer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the response! A lot of interesting points I hadn't considered! For the product consistency, I assume you are talking about non-fully-automated factories? With full automation "adherence to best practices" hopefully shouldn't be as hard to ensure, I hope. For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be…

>For the product consistency, I assume you are talking about non-fully-automated factories? With full automation "adherence to best practices" hopefully shouldn't be as hard to ensure, I hope.

Automation certainly helps, but there are quirks and hiccups you could run into. Let's say you built a factory every 5 years. Along the way some machinery vendor goes out of business. You might or might not have the machine design, the rights to make another version, etc.

As you build out, you figure out things that work well or don't work well, and you make adjustments to your process accordingly. Building every factory identically or at the same time is probably a bad choice unless everything is really well fleshed out. The marginal benefits of upgrading older factories to the new standard is rarely economically viable.

>For tariffs, if we assume that a big part of the specific industries playes are distributed internationally, the size of the industry in general should be the much more significant factor, as you are not lobbying individually anyway, right? If you can even go as far as fluidly shift production between countries you should be to negotiate better lobbying deals, which I understand is how the automotive industry operates to some degree?

The actions I've seen (not limited to former employers) include CEO's meeting with high level federal government officials, getting local property tax exemptions for expansions bringing jobs, and collaborative industry group action about unfair dumping of product on the US market.

Remember each manufacturer in an industry group has a different structure. Some things are good for the industry as a whole, and some are more beneficial for one manufacturer than another. CEO's advocate for their own company too, not limiting public actions to trade group actions.

--

Previously I hadn't covered capital expenditure. Building factories is super expensive and tooling factories is also super expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if the facility and tooling would run 100M-500M.

Even in manual assembly, you'd have jigs and tools to buy, go/no-go guages, etc.

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

#230

Post by velox_io » Mon, Jul 06, 2020, 11:11 PM UTC

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