Comment by roenxi
1 day ago
> However, the hardware situation you described sounds very brittle to me. If the machine shop is so tightly constrained and error-phobic, that sounds like there's very little space of tinkering, exploration or innovation.
The technical term for that is "the real world". Moment of perspective on just how weird the software people are that they don't just accept mucking around as expensive and dangerous.
I don't think "mucking around" is the correct perspective there.
It's hard to argue that most if not all of the recent innovations in manufacturing concern making chains more modulable, and easier and cheaper to modifywhich you could see as bringing manufacturing closer and closer to software engineering and this is probably to be even more true in the year to come.
Large scale automation using mostly wireless technology, easily reconfigurable pick-and-place machine and robot conveyor, cheap additive manufacturing, easy to use and cheap CNC machining with precision which were until recently limited to very expensive models, we are quickly getting to a point where configuring a mostly automated short run is both manageable and cost effective provided you have invested in the tooling and have the engineers able to put it in place efficiently.
I think that when people talk about bringing back manufacturing, most think Ford Model T assembly line in 1900 when the norm is quickly becoming a SpaceX-like pacing. That's basically what you are competing against in South East Asia and it sadly has far less need for an uneducated workforce than many expect.
Do you have some references for the pick and place and other reconfiguration things you mentioned. I've been out of this space for a while but last I checked these were still incredibly challenging things to get right.
I'd also like more comprehensive write-ups on such topics but either I haven't found the right sources yet or all the people who know how to set up and keep modern fabrication infrastructure going are too busy raking in the cash and making stuff. ^^
If you like visual media, the "Strange Parts" YouTube channel is an interesting source for glimpses into modern, mostly Chinese factories: https://www.youtube.com/@StrangeParts/
Since you're asking about pick and place specifically, https://www.opulo.io/ is an interesting example of how far/cheap you can push such machinery (and the design in and of itself is interesting from a manufacturing point of view). Not all that relevant from a mass-production point of view, though.
That sounds catchy but I think it doesn't survive further inspection. People mucking around with machines and processes were rather instrumental in creating lathes, steam power, rockets, computers, looms, software, CNC-machines and all those other puzzle pieces we have available to make stuff. They are also instrumental in developing those things further.
I'm also kind of curious as to know what kind of machine shops you base this on. Most production companies, labs and even small fabricators I've seen have continued to develop and to optimize their infrastructure and processes. To take the numbers discussed here: 50 years ago, (C)NC machines, CAD and CAM were in their infancy. And that stuff certainly has changed some things in the world of fabrication.
Machine shops, and serious software shops don't fo their mucking about in prod. Any machine shop experimentation that takes fown the production line is like Google or Meta going partially or fully offline - which has happened - but is also financially painful, so they do all they can to avoid it.
Sure - I guess this is generally true for most work domains, not just machine shops and serious software shops. However, the argument I was responding to was that there is no mucking about in the "real world" and that there is this difference between mucky software people and the serious creators of real stuff. Which I don't agree with.
btw: If we understand "machine shop" as a mass production environment with modern, integrated production lines, it is my anecdotal experience that there is a massive amount of muckery and fuckery involved in getting such an environment to run (usually called "integration" or some such which probably looks better on business cards). There's also a good chance that over the years - or decades - different people will engage in further iterations of the muck-pile to modify the system for new requirements from high on up or weird edge cases, to replace components that are no longer available with other stuff or to do whatever else the day might call for.
I don't think it's weird, it's just a feature of their/our tools. For software people, experimentation is cheap and easy. Version control means rollbacks are easy and fast. If you do break something, completely rebuilding the application from scratch is something that happens dozens of times per day anyway. When trying a new tool, it arrives with almost no lead time and often at zero cost, so the only price is a few person-hours of work.