Saturn Robotics

• Some (kid?) developing a manufacturing process for motors/actuators
• Initially built own lathe & mill for cheap
• The commercial machines are $50k+, but able to build good enough home version more cheaply in terms of parts, but maybe also labor? Wonder if he'd be able to scale that to making more machines without his labor (hiring someone else to build them)
• Assembly of motors not that complicated with just a few main components and steps
• Machines that automate these steps (winding, magnet insertion, glue, etc) are very expensive but you can design and build your own for a lot less
• One of the biggest costs is just the huge lead time for getting n+1 machine. May take 80-100 days to receive new machine
• This is really bad if a machine goes down because you're kinda stuck and if you don't have excess capacity, it can cascade.
• To get fixed, you go on an odyssey to find someone to work on it and takes forever
• They have a lot of ideas about good software for factory management but probably a story for another day once at higher scale
• The software part of the article a lot more future looking and speculative

Sounds really fun. I'd like the challenge of manufacturing actuators from the ground up. Lots of really interesting ways to go. A while ago, I went through a little thought experiment of what I would need to automate manufacturing of brushless motors. It sounds like it wasn't totally unreasonable to think it could be done with relatively few resources. I'm interested to follow their journey and see how they work their way to full-stack automation.