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Inside the Raspberry Pi Factory
An anonymous reader writes "Here's a photo walk through of how Raspberry Pi boards are made at a Sony factory in South Wales, UK. The factory says that the multiple automated and manual checks have meant that only two of the 150,000 boards made there have been shipped with defects."
Whoever designed the photo album viewer never heard of XMLHttpRequest.
It's all about "page views", baby!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I think this: post from Pi is a better "walk-through", as it includes descriptions as well as pictures.
But, that's just me.
So even if they have defects, they still get shipped, despite the numerous automated and manual checks?
I'm not sure what you mean. No test can capture 100% of all possible faults especially if you include any of the faults that mean things work to begin with but then fail later on (e.g. a weak solder joint will work to begin with, but the increased current density will tend to exacerbate the weak point making it fail terminally).
In any chip itself there will be hard to find points of failure (a metal contact problem causing the pipeline to not flow control properly for example). Or they could be a weak driver on a memory cell caused by an implantation fail that means that under hot temperature conditions the memory write doesn't always successfully occur. What if it is a shielding problem on one of your clocks so that one multiplier experiences cross-talk sufficient to corrupt data in a cold chip only when the PSU is working with components at the limit of their tolerance?
You can find many of these faults but how much is it worth adding to the cost of the system to catch that last 1% or last 0.00001% of problems?
Production test is a hard probabilistic field where many of the problems are none obvious. At the end of the day all you can do is have the best test methodology available with careful monitoring of defect rates backed up by a solid returns policy.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
If you order one from the Newark Element 14 place, you can probably get one in about 3 weeks (maybe not right now with holidays coming up), since they're the ones using the UK manufacturing facility and can complete their orders much faster. I ordered a Model B on November 3rd and got it last week.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Because in my experience, the yield from the chinese Model B factory is 50%.
My first RPi is currently tied up in a work project, so I ordered another model B from Newark. It came in and I fired it up yesterday, no LEDs or any signs of life. Dead.
Then I noticed the main BGA in the center of the card looked a bit askew, looked closer and noticed the BCM2835 was missing. The Samsung DRAM that ordinary sits on top of the '2835 was soldered straight onto the PCB. I understand the part shooter fucking up once in a while and missing a chip, but the board shouldn't have made it out of the factory.
C'mon. I'd rather pay a few extra bucks for something that's most likely going to work, than do what I'm doing now and spending even more bucks mailing the fucking thing back, and crossing my fingers that the replacement works too...
I'd never have ordered mine if I knew Sony gets something from making these.
If it's only one of five, it would be extremely interesting for RPi team they are actively working on solutions for usb problems (there were several found and some corrected already). Could you help them and write your experiences in this thread?
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Only 2 so far from the Sony factory in the UK, none of the boards made in China count towards that total.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
While I can understand why they went with a cheap, standard, connector(rather than yet-another-goddam-slightly-different-barrel-plug), I suspect that the rPI support guys are cursing the day that they chose a USB socket as a DC-in jack.
To put it politely, the quality of USB chargers and powered hub wall warts is excitingly variable. If you are trying to run an ARM SoC, a USB ethernet controller, and possibly a couple of other downstream devices, all with just a +5 rail of potentially erratic specs, that isn't good for reliability. By going with the USB socket, they opened the field to every last dollar-store iCharger knockoff and its creative interpretation of what +5vDC looks like...
In one of the images (#11) in the article you can see screenshot of the "Automatic Inspection" software. It says that the defect rate is over 1%, i.e. for 150,000 units it should have been more than 1,500 defective units. Of course, they did mention that it was "shipped" units they were bragging about.
Yes its just you.
You will always get shit code. Removing JS doesn't help that at all.
Geocities caused horrible atrocities without any JS.
Get a DC Volt-meter.
While RPi is running and accesing USB devices measure between TP1 & TP2 points on the board.
If the voltage is near or below 4.75V or near or above 5.25V the fault resides in your power supply.
The ideal powersupply should be a clean 5.1V one 1A or more - as you have some voltage drops over the polyfuses.
I have two "original" 256Mb RPis Made In China and all the common USB issues i had were fixed with better power supplies (old 5V,2A PSP power brick & 5V,3A DC 7~24V to 5V step-down from dx.com)
Also - use a powered USB hub.
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The UK computer industry enjoyed a mini-rennaisance in 2012 thanks to the popularity of the $40 Raspberry Pi
Are they serious? Do they even know where the ARM SoC is designed?
It amazes me that the Arm Holdings stock was only around $20 a few months ago, when they are without question the most dominant, stable, and secure tech company in the world. Both Apple and Google are completely dependent on the licenses they have acquired from ARM to allow them to use their risc based ultra low power cpu in their devices, and to allow the manufacturers (samsung, ti, etc) to build those chips, and yet in some cases their stocks are twenty times more.
This amazes me, but at least ARM's stock has doubled in the past few months. There is NO bigger player in the computer industry in the world than the UK. I make this claim upon the the fact that now mobile is the dominant platform, and ARM is the only real player in that game (as of yet). Anyone can license and manufacture these chips for cheap and give us crappy hardware as a result, but the ingenuity is in their reduced and low complexity instruction set which allows for their ultra low power design, which is why almost everybody is using their SoC designs.
The only reason that nobody realizes this and their stock has been stagnant in the past is because they don't have a "ARM inside" sticker on every ARM based device made. It there was such a sticker, they would be beyond any doubt the most popular company in the world.
Disclaimer: I am Canadian (and live there at the moment), but I am also a UK citizen. I also don't hold any ARM stocks, though I am kicking myself that I still have yet to acquire any, since it would have almost doubled in value over the past year.
Please, don't.
I have just run a Raspberry Jam (albeit a little one) because I believe in this Foundation and their stated aims, but I cannot abide SONY and their company ethos vis a vis customer respect and DRM.
If I could I'd buy RasPis that had been made somewhere else. Both of mine came from China, but the one that I got for a friend came from SONY. As will my next one, unfortunately.
Shitty SONY. Bad SONY. May everything you touch (aside from RasPis) turn to sand in your clutches.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Is there a way to test what power supplies are good for the Pi with a multimeter? Have any links to known good chargers?
Good-bye
Dave Jones' "EEVBlog" recently did a teardown of a couple knockoff AppleUSB chargers. Some pretty scary cruft inside, for sure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi-b9k-0KfE
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Where is your non-profit company trying to kids interested in computers? Thats what the Pi foundation IS. All this selling to us geeks is just to build a community. The main purpose of the Pi is to educate.
Good-bye
Agreed. I picked up a microUSB "travel charger" for my Pi. Claims 1000 ma. It doesn't give the USB enough power to find a network with a wireless dongle.
A kindle keyboard charger at 850 ma powers up the network every time. So does feeding the Pi off a USB hub.
So, lesson learned. Weird issues -> check the power adapter.