Silicon Graybeard
Asks the perfectly legitimate question “What’s the big deal?”
Well, if you’re a programmer, the examples I’ve already shown aren’t that big a deal, but a: They’re in two axis, and b: we’re talking about industrial control here, not hobbyist stuff. What’s the difference? Plenty.
Industrial controls have not changed dramatically for many years. Yes, the processors have improved, but only at a pace that has been necessary for the industry. Cellphones are loaded with processing power, because users demand more and more. Metal removal can only take place at specific speeds within a specific horsepower range on the cutting tool, and to develop controls with more speed than is required to do that is of literally no value. Especially when the predominant issue is not speed but reliability.
When someone spends a half a million dollars on a machining center, and that is not a difficult thing to to at all, you want it to run. And run, and run, and run some more. For this reason the makers of machine tool controls are downright stodgy.
As a result of this machine tool CNC is fairly reliable. How reliable? I’m glad you asked. A Fanuc industrial robot has a published mean time between failure of 76,000 hours
Seventy. Six. Thousand. Hours. Mean. Time. Between. Failure.
That is operating at 100% of rated temperature, at 100% of rated speed, and at 100% of rated load. IN actual operation, it’s a lot more like 100,000 hours. What does that mean? Imagine if you bought a car tomorrow, and you drove it as fast as it could go, on the roughest roads imaginable, twenty four hours a day seven days a week, and did NOTHING to it other than put in gas, and at the end of 11 years, it was still humming along as sweetly as if it were brand new.
Eleven. Years.
This may seem like an exaggeration but it is not, it is actual data collected by Fanuc. Anecdotally, I have been in the industry for twenty five years now, and in that time I have installed hundreds of robots. I have also serviced them, and here is the breakdown as to why I had to service them
1: The user programmed the robot to do something stupid. The robot/machine tool did the stupid thing. It broke the robot/machine tool. 80%
2: An external device attached to the robot broke or failed or wore out. 20%
3: The robot itself wore out. 0%
Oh, I have seen robots that were worn out, most of which are now in excess of 30 years old but which in their lifetimes made hundreds of thousands if not millions of parts. Machine tools, likewise, fail, some with a more astounding regularity than others, but almost invariably because of abuse. I have at least one customer who has 40 year old NC machinery which is still running quite nicely with little or no downtime.
So: Why not use some of that processing power to make machines faster? Well, they already go as fast as is remotely practical, and the development cost of industrially hardening hugely fast controls is ludicrous, and not worth it.
And when the hipsters realize what that translates to in terms of millions of burgers automatically grilled and assembled, lattes artistically brewed, poured and served.
Well, they’ll just figure it out a bit too late.
Of course, they’ll be getting paid $15 per hour, just like they’ve been demanding.
Problem (for them) is, their pay stubs will be showing zero-hours at that rate.
Winning!
Jim
Sunk New Dawn
Galveston, TX
lol. I know a company who is already making mechanized burger flippers. Look for them at a Jack IN The Box near you soon.
Sadly, technological advancement is it’s own worst enemy. One of the primary reasons to make machines that never wear out is that modern processors and their supporting components aren’t typically manufactured for more than five to ten years. If you don’t build it tough, then all you have is a very expensive, very large, paperweight in less time that it takes to amortize the expense.
Yeah, been there. Done that.
That Rich, is precisely correct. The technology advances at the rate that it is supportable.
What will everyone do with the free time they will have. It is amazing what can happen with good enough.
Fascinating stuff. Yeah, I’m familiar with the difference between industrial and hobby electronics; I spent the two largest chunks of my career in military aerospace and commercial aviation.
So I just want to correct one tiny minor thing. Modern computer hardware is not unreliable. The things that cause the Blue Screen of Death and other hangups we all see are from software being sloppy, not hardware. In the worlds I come from there is no reliance on typical commercial software. Everything is written to standards that the average commercial place can’t comprehend.
We’d spend more time verifying the quality of the software for an aircraft system than the production lifetime of a cellphone. You don’t want to reboot an aircraft at 35,000 feet.
There is one exception to the newest processors not being as reliable as older ones: radiation. If you’re operating in an environment where incoming radiation is higher than typical ground level background radiation, like in space or in aircraft flying over the Rockies or over the north or south poles, the smaller silicon geometries are more susceptible to being disrupted by cosmic rays.
I don’t think that applies to most machine tools.
Radiation is nothing. When you have a frequency invertor doing rapid accel/decel on a three phase motor whose leads are the size of your wrist with literally no shielding whatsoever and your plane computer will deal with that, we’ll talk. Never saw an avionics component that wasnt shielded six ways to sunday, a big cnc machine generates enough rfi to scramble common gear. And yes, its all about the software. When you need pentium speed to do an operation, what reasoning is there to provide it with teraflops? Siemens is excellent at the “more is better” game. You can tell which machines have Siemens computers in a shop, theyre not working.
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