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Lots of automation. 17 people make 3,000 boards a day. Impressive.
And I bet there is no issue with the staff talking while they work (see below).

Compare to iPhone and iPad manufacture...

"You might be surprised to learn that the iPad and iPhone are mostly assembled by hand, not by a robotic arm and sophisticated assembly system. It takes your iPhone 141 steps to get from start to finish. The iPad takes 5 days to be assembled by 325 hands."
The above from a Nightline special when they toured a FoxConn plant

Each step is some very simple task that a worker does thousands of times per shift
AND
no talking is permitted.
12 hour shifts with two one hour meal breaks.
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Moderator
The Plant making the PI looks far more like a Prototyping Facility than a Large Scale Production Shop.

Foxconn themselves use Robotics to populate the Circuit Boards as it's not possible to do it any other way and from that point on their systems fall down to unproductive assemble methods.

However the PI has the same issues with the Hand Placed Components where there is a massive slow down in the production process. wink

Col
If you had viewed the other photos and read their captions you would have seen this:

"After the solder paste has been added, electronic components are placed on the board using surface mount technology machines.

These machines can mount close to 25,000 components every hour, placing individual components in a blur of motion.

Each Pi has 173 surface mounted components, and it typically takes 150 seconds to finish mounting the six boards in a panel.

The factory uses three such machines to produce the Pi, one for mounting the underside of boards and two for the top."

That sure looks like automation to me... But what do I know... I used to run the systems that operate Netflix's automated dvd handling machines... 3000-4000 units / day isn't the same as the 7MM DVD's per day we were handling when I was there but all that automation was supported by about 1500 people!
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Moderator
Was Photo & Caption 8 I think at least that is the only thing that has any reference to hand placed components.

Where it clearly says

Large components, such as USB ports, are manually inserted into the boards. There are five such "through hole" components in the Raspberry Pi.

So exactly where did I suggest that this was not Automated? And Surface Mount Technology has to be Automated as it's not possible to manually place Surface Mount Components onto the Circuit Board accurately enough to have working boards.

Not really sure what you are smoking but can I have some? And it still looks like a Prototyping setup to me not a large scale production facility. Though what would I know. silly

Col grin
wink

But I'll let you decide what ";)" means - but there is a meaning, if not two, and likely more profound than what you're willing to admit to contemplating.

Excessive gobs of (low quality) thermal grease applied to a CPU has a counteractive effect... so it takes a little time and care to do that...

Still, let's have our myopic little economy automate and devalue everything, followed by it damning all the "lazy" people, while the companies keep getting taxpayer-funded handouts at "lazy" peoples' expense... yeah, that's the ticket!
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Remarkable fault rate
uksp Updated - 4th Dec
"Of the 150,000 boards the factory has made only six have been returned and only two of those related to a genuine defect." - remarkable considering the staged process.
It would be really cool if all their industrial controls were ran by their little product. happy
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I'll take one please! I usually like my pi a la mode-but let's skip the ice cream this time. It will ruin the circuits! LOL

I'm an adult who wants to know more about computers-not just how to use Microsoft Office or how to clean viruses off my hard drive. In fact I'd like several of them.

I live in the United States. How do I get one here?

sparkie
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Moderator
http://www.raspberrypi .org/faqs
remember to remove the space from between raspberrypi and the .org for a working link.

Col
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