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

241–250 of 284 posts

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

#241

Post by aidenn0 »

smoe wrote: post #210

> 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…

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.

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

#242

Post by efficax »

pletsch wrote: post #31
rusk wrote: post #11

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 w…

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.

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!

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

#243

Post by ThomW »

LeonM wrote: post #26
ThomW wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Yeah. I have a "launch" Pro, and it's been noisy as heck since day one. haha

As others have said, they fixed it in later revisions of the hardware. :)

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

#244

Post by AceJohnny2 »

wallacoloo wrote: post #238
vmception wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha just a few years ahead of its time! Some of the first bitcoin faucets had captchas to “reduce spam”, as in prevent humans from getting too much free bitcoin, but really the captcha was a real captcha that a bot was stuck on, and was just paying humans to solve them to access some greater bounty

Morally ambiguous, but I actually implemented exactly what you’re describing back when bitcoin was at $50-100. I found some service that would pay me $1 for every 1000 captchas I solved, and then I scraped that and built a BTC faucet site (I think I called it captchacoin.com, or captchabit.com) that would essentially pay the user $0.50 in BTC for each captcha they solved. It went from 0 captchas per day to 10000 capt…

Have an upvote for the story, but don't pretend it was "morally ambiguous". That was plain evil with one level of detachment, and helped enable spammers and scammers.

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

#245

Post by numpad0 »

rusk wrote: post #11

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 w…

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.

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

#246

Post by Smoosh »

Animats wrote: post #156
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.

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.

> 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.

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

#247

Post by vmception »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #244
wallacoloo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morally ambiguous, but I actually implemented exactly what you’re describing back when bitcoin was at $50-100. I found some service that would pay me $1 for every 1000 captchas I solved, and then I scraped that and built a BTC faucet site (I think I called it captchacoin.com, or captchabit.com) that would essentially pay the user $0.50 in BTC for each captcha they solved. It went from 0 captchas per day to 10000 capt…

Have an upvote for the story, but don't pretend it was "morally ambiguous". That was plain evil with one level of detachment, and helped enable spammers and scammers.

cryptocurrency needed faucets and it helped adoption

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

#248

Post by enchiridion »

dfox wrote: post #103
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.

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.

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?

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

#249

Post by shard »

sbierwagen wrote: post #206
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... ;)

If you try to download the Windows version from http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ Chrome blocks the download, saying that the .rar contains a virus. Downloading singularity-1.00-win.zip from https://github.com/singularity/singularity/releases/tag/v1.0... also fails.

Is that how the game starts? With the AI trying to infect your computer upon install? That's pretty meta.

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

#250

Post by waste_monk »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #147
vmception wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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... ;)

I remember playing this a decade or so ago and just went to the site to grab a copy for old times sake...

>Download 1.00, released 07-04-2020

Mindblowing that this is still under active development after all this time. I can't wait to get home and play it to see what's changed.

Post reply on HN