How Raspberry Pis are made (Factory Tour)

every Raspberry Pi starts its life on the production line here at the Sony tech center in pencil Wales UK I was honored to be invited to share with you an inside look at the high-tech manufacturing line for the pi 4 where they've made nearly 50 million raspberry pies in the past decade every employee I talked to was focused on making every pie reliable and efficient and it was fascinating learning about the history of the factory and how the line Works my name is Andrew Penton I'm a leading engineer for new business development team here at sewing UK Tech I've been here just a Todd over 26 years now what we say is the the life of raspberry Piers we say this actually begins in our smt department which are surface among technology and in that area this is where the actual individual circuit boards get populated they come in a panel of nine each individual circuit board gets populated the first part of that process is applying solder paste to the board buckets done by a screen printer it's a very similar to had many many years ago on how you'd actually manufacture a book the squeegee actually put the the fresh paste down onto the circuit boards then we apply all the individual components now it's very unique how we apply these individual components it's like building a city for example we start with the very small houses or the very small components and they build up the larger components the reason they do that is because the heads on the pick and place machine that Catlin gun like thing that spits circuits onto the solder paste uses a tiny puff of air to jam the components into the paste the head has to get really close to the board like a millimeter or two because of that they have to put the shorter components down first then the larger ones otherwise the tools would obliterate the larger components while they're spinning around so the initial key is smaller components in the underside the board and they get crosses first then the larger components on the top side of the boat and they get done last employees changed out these component reels a few times while I was there right now the Reel with the soc at the heart of the pie this big Square chip is the major bottleneck when they run out they have to shut down the entire line until they get more after the pick and Place machines the pcbs head into the Reflow oven so one of the key things about the Reflow oven is the temperature as it progresses in so it's quite a long level and it starts off at the lowest sort of the 150 degrees and then moves up to the 260 degrees and there's a reason for this so when the actual circuit board gets in if there's moisture in it we slowly need to remove that moisture from the process because if we heat it instantly up to the highest temperature you'll get something called popcorn which can damage the parts those moisture will get inside the components and they'll burst out so you could say that the raspberry pies are baked in an oven yeah Raspberry Pi we bake raspberry pies here the few points I saw machines taking tons of pictures of the board so I asked about them through the smt line as well we have various air we have um eoi inspection which is automatic inspection if you drill components make sure everything is placed correctly great locations nothing's missing if any flowers found the board was pulled for manual rework the boards were marked by hand so they could get these boards back in the line quickly they have dozens of Hop of completed boards at the end of the SMD line and before getting to the next part I asked Andrew about the Factory's history a little bit of history about the building it was actually open so when you first came here in 1973 and how Sony come here was was now King Charles Matthew they were one of our founder members in Japan Marie de San it's this Factory where we're in today was actually opened by the queen in 1992 and this is now the UK Technology Center here in 10 college South Wales so if I fast forward it a couple of years to where we are now how cool products as you can see behind me here a broadcast professional cameras a master setup units camera control units and OLED viewfinders one of the most visually impressive parts of the line is where the larger through-hole components are placed one by one by these dutiful robots the next stage is where we'll actually play the likes of the ethernet ports the USBs and headphone Jacks and in that part of the process right now we're using collaborative robots to place those components a while back this entire process was done by hand by employees and some people watching this will probably lament the fact that humans are being replaced by robots but look closely at how these robots actually place the components that little wiggle you see that was programmed in by a human programming the robots requires a ton of back and forth between Engineers line workers and the robot manufacturers to get them to work reliably for placing millions of components these robots mostly make the line faster there are still humans loading in component trays feeding the robots with the raw parts that go on the boards or clearing up jams the robots increase line capacity and free the humans to do other things better like look at those gpio pins there's a custom Hopper that uses only vibration to align a relatively complex part perfectly every time how cool is that but the robots aren't perfect and that's why there's always a human at the end of this part of the line placing the last few components the robots can't get to in fact I got to see what it takes to clean up after the robots I've been told that I could try doing this and see how good I am to get it no problem and try not to make a huge mess at your station he's my brother you've got about 27 seconds for every oh boy did you take a seat we're gonna try this out so you should only have to put in the four gpios so these bottom four so the short end down I've put together some of these you know but only like one every year and then so then you've got a five ethernet oh boy middle left I heard a beep I hope that wasn't me yeah after you've done that it's just a quick sentence check I'm making sure that all the components on the boards obviously you've got the three the two USBS the the ethernet yeah and then you press this button I did it there's a little bit of a backlog yeah I gotta I gotta be as fast as the robot I don't think about the other plans though it's slightly therapeutic but it's also slightly nerve-wracking because when you touch it sometimes you touch another component yeah so the robots are pretty accurate but not 100 and now I know if I need a body double oops I'm gonna break everything here thank you very much no problem these employees are an essential part of the line before the final selective soldering process and right before that I caught sight of the little Sony atrios box I wonder what AI they're doing inside there the next stage from there we'll be going through a draw selective soldering process so this is where it gets heated up to around 260 degrees into your process up to I think finally 275 degrees for the solder becomes molten and we apply the solder through individual Jets to the components such as ethernet and that obviously cools off then and that goes into a final stage of the process this process is a little more directed than wave soldering and it's a critical part of the manufacturing line they have tons of these expensive blocks of pure solder ready to go into the molten bath this machine has four giant screws that very methodically dips the board into the bath and slowly pulls it out ensuring a perfect connection on hundreds of through holes on every set of Pi boards oh and don't drink that after the selective soldering the boards go through a cooling chamber and under that chamber I found one of the 15 or so raspberry pies I could find along the manufacturing line that are building other raspberry pies pies building pies I even did a video on the revolution pie last year so go check that out if you want on the topic of pie products you could find in a factory Seed Studio sponsored this video and they just launched the re-terminal DM it's built around a compute module 4 which is also made right here in the Sony Factory this thing can integrate with node-red for low code programming and event-driven applications it has a rugged design with an ip65 front panel and electrically isolated i o it's great for any kind of HMI from a premium home assistant controller to Industrial use Seed Studio also offers odm Services they can help with everything from product development and r d to production and support even this re-terminal DM could be customized for your use case they're releasing even more new products based on the pi like this rerouter a travel router also based on the compute module 4 or their Edge box line of industrial Pi computers check out seeds Raspberry Pi blog for more and check out the links in the description after the boards cool down in this little wind tunnel they're checked One Last Time by a technician and any little spot that needs a little extra solder gets it then one of the most impressive parts of the line is this the giant farm of 64 fully automated test jigs they all get individually tested on a bed of nails test fixture and all the likes of the SD card the HDMI connections headphone Jacks they'll be automatically connected as part of a test jig then it will be passer fail at that stage 99 of them will be a pass and I kept finding more and more of these little boxes inside of which is another Raspberry Pi pies building pies all over the place here but that brings me to something I sensed as I talked to the Sony in place and even when I was discussing how they build pies with Gordon Hollingsworth over in the labs at pihq Sony and Raspberry Pi worked together to build the test jig and they even have a manual version of it at Pi HQ so they can continually improve it like one time they found out if someone loaded a component upside down it would still work but not the right way so they modified The Jig and Pi HQ to make sure it would detect that error pass the knowledge to the Sony engineers and one by one they got all the jigs in the factory upgraded now that problem can never happen again and having this kind of tight relationship means when Raspberry Pi discovers new things in their labs they can quickly iterate on the manufacturing process to make it better and better Andrew said he's been involved with Raspberry Pi since the very beginning I was involved with the Rousey probably the initial introduction and that was back in around 2012. their values and behaviors seem to match a lot with ours so we thought let's give these guys a chance and you know what the rest is history now how many pies did they predict that you would be manufacturing initially so we thought we were going to be in the tens of thousands this quickly increased I think by 2013 we'd actually manufactured a millionth pay and where we are today this year we're in winter had over 50 millionth by one line that looks like it's changed a lot from the older videos I've seen is the packing line it's a hundred percent automated and full of clever engineering tricks I'm privileged to be um one of the members who actually developed that stage the process and who's effectively a year of our lives so we've done some explority work and how people packaging processes in the food and drink industry in the pharmaceutical industry tree we've developed it into our process here how we've done that is we've minimized how we deliver the boxes into they all becoming flat packed we actually erect the boxes here and they're automatically glued into a punch machine once that plant wishing he goes into an indexing conveyor the actual boards the manuals and the individual reading cards are placed with them foreign glue in the box and I wanted to spend a little more time on this part of the line because it was fascinating so many different noises and motions I could probably spend half an hour mesmerized by any one part but this little robot it picks up a tested pie off the line and holds it over this little scanner the scanner checks it out and if everything's good into the box it goes then as the pies come out of the machine this little piston does what it does it used to help align the side flaps then it kept things tucked in the Box I love this piston because it's a reminder of how this line evolves over time and because it still tries its best no matter what then there's another quality assurance test a camera that takes a picture of each box before it gets sealed up for good you can see that each time you see the flash then this fun machine shuffles the pies over to the final line where some of the cleverest engineering results in a nicely closed box the metal flap in the middle holds the side down while a metal bar slowly presses the lid down the blue box squirts a couple Blobs of glue on the outside then one more metal flap bends down the lid completing the packaging process a backstage then we'll actually read the box to make sure all the individual components are fitted then they will be selected at the end of the process to be packaged into the box so you get 150 into a final box then for shipment that last little check measures the Box's weight to the gram if anything is missing it'll pop the package out but I love this little 3D printed flapper that swats the pile Along on its way if no other pie comes along to push it off the scale in time there we go let me automatically pack them place them into the box and get them shipped up to a warehouse at the end of my day at the factory I waited for one more box to roll off the line yay normally a worker would tape it and stack it but they let me hold one of the thousands and thousands of Pies they made that day at least for a second we we produce these pies I think they're in quantities of 180 to 200 000 a week right now we're producing pies like we say is every 3.14 seconds and that's just the pi 4. the factory was making Pi 3B plus pi zero and even some cm4 and cm4s while I was there have you ever thought about building an automated test jig for a cm4 it's hard but Sony has one and just like with the pi 4 the cm4 test jig has another Raspberry Pi hiding inside there's also the cm4s which is a child of the shortage I can't imagine the pain some Engineers had to go through building the automated test jigs that can survive thousands of insertions of basically what amounts to a stick of RAM so when we initially started a conversations with the guys from Raspberry Pi he's very quick to understand that we shared the same values and behaviors all about inspiring the Next Generation and where we are today we continue to inspire each other to try things forward

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 365,108

Keywords: raspberry pi, factory, tour, sony, wales, pencoed, uk, british, united kingdom, jeff geerling, doppleganger, body double, funny, line, worker, workers, computers, electronics, pick and place, robots, abb, additive, manufacturing, automation, automated, tooling, packaging, smd, smc, pcb, plant, speed, process, takt, timing, boards, sbc, linux, open source, reterminal, dm, hmi, machine, glue, assembly, efficiency, monitoring, reel, tape, squeegee, paste, solder, hand, manual, qa, testing, jig, bed of nails

Id: k2C4lbbIH0c

Length: 14min 17sec (857 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 08 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/newocean]

12:42... "then we automatically pack them, place them into the box and get them shipped out to a warehouse."

So like... do they ever make it there?

[u/casc1701]

And then they disappear to never be seen again.

[u/Dreddguy]

I live about ten miles away from the Sony plant. Yet I feel like I'm about a year away from getting the Raspberry Pi 4 I need.

[u/xRoboProCloner]

Who let this title pass man.

[u/ButWhatIfItQueffed]

I read that as "They bake Piss here".

[u/WilloTehWisp]

Go bake some Zero 2 Ws so we can finally get one from non-scalpers...

[u/Beginning-Pace-1426]

I see all of the jokes I wanted to make have already been made. Great job fellas!