Assembly Line Tutorial

At Pixall Manufacturing, your part in the product life cycle begins when our R&D department comes up with a design for a new product, so we'll start by paying a visit to the Products page.

Product Designs

A good product to get started on is the Phunky Phrisbee. Click on it in the column on the left and you'll see a diagram of it. The column on the right shows the composition of the materials making up the product. This one is very simple, just a solid disc 25 pixels in diameter made of a single material.

Materials Science

As you may remember from your high school chemistry classes, all matter is made up of varying amounts of the three basic elements ruddium (R), verdium (G) and bluminum (B). Each pixel can contain up to 15 atoms of each element, indicated by a subscript in the chemical formula. Our example product is made of R15, or pure ruddium.

The interstices between the atoms are filled with a black substance known as obscurum, sometimes referred to as the "fourth element", although this is not strictly accurate, since it's not really an element but an absence of any element. (Don't worry if you don't understand this -- a study of quantum chromatology is needed to fully appreciate it.) The amount of obscurum is not usually shown in the formula, since it's implied by the amounts of the elements. The special case of a completely black pixel is written as K.

Building a Factory

The Factory page is where you build and operate a factory. On the right there is a selection of controls and editing tools. From top to bottom they are:

Getting Materials In

The first thing we will need is a way of getting raw materials into the factory. Switch to the Machines page and select the Supply Hopper. Then switch back to the Factory page and select the Add tool.



As you move the mouse around the factory, an outline of the machine to be added moves with it. The outline is green when it's over a space where the machine can be placed, otherwise it's red. In the case of this particular machine, the outline sticks to the left edge of the screen. That's because a Supply Hopper needs to be on the left side of the factory where the materials come in.



Position the Supply Hopper about half way down the screen and click the mouse button to place it. If you accidentally put it in the wrong place, use the Move tool to drag it to a better position.


Building a Conveyor

Next, we need a conveyor belt to get the materials to a machine that can process them. From the Machines page, select the Conveyor End, and then go back to the Factory page. Position it underneath the Supply Hopper, towards the left, and click to add it.



Now select a Conveyor Section from the Machines page, and place it under the Supply Hopper next to the Conveyor End.



Add three more Conveyor Sections, and then another Conveyor End.



The conveyor belt needs a motor to drive it. Select the Conveyor Drive from the Machines page and place it just below one of the Conveyor End sections.



At this point, you can try switching on the factory to see what happens. Click the Start button. You'll get a message asking whether you want to purchase the machines you've just added; answer OK.

If you've positioned all the items properly, the conveyor belt should start moving. When you've finished watching it, click the Stop button.

Choice of Materials

The Supply Hopper isn't supplying anything yet, because we haven't told it what material we want. Select the Configure tool and click on the top part of the Supply Hopper (the part that isn't over the conveyor belt). You'll get a dialog box for specifying the material that the hopper will supply.



Enter 15 0 0 into the R, G, B boxes.

Materials come in standard size sheets. There isn't a 25x25 sheet available, unfortunately --  the closest size is 30 x 30. Enter these numbers into the Sheet Size boxes.

You can now see what the material is going to cost. The elements come at different prices -- ruddium is quite cheap, verdium is somewhat more expensive, and bluminum is more expensive again. Also, pixels made of pure elements are more expensive than ones that are mixtures.

The sheet size also affects the price -- it's more economical to purchase materials in larger sized sheets, provided it won't result in excessive wastage.

Finally, you need to set the Supply Rate, which governs the time between delivery of successive sheets of material. A rate of 30 sheets per hour will be suitable for this exercise. (An hour of game time corresponds to a minute of real time, so this translates to one sheet every two seconds.)

When you've finished configuring the Supply Hopper, click OK.

You may want to try running the factory again now. Sheets of material should begin dropping onto the conveyor and moving along it. At the moment, they'll just fall off when they get to the end, so stop before you waste too much material.


Processing the Material

Now we need a machine to turn the raw material into a useful product. From the Machines page, select a Punch and place it so that the bottom part is over the conveyor belt.



Using the Configure tool, click on the Punch (again, above the conveyor belt). Here you get to select the shape and size of the punching tool, how far from the edge of the material you want to punch, and which edge of the material to measure from.



For our purposes, we want a circular tool with a Diameter of 25 and an Offset of 2, measured from either edge.

If you run the factory again now, you'll see the Punch in action. You'll be asked to confirm another equipment purchase.



The discs that are punched out come out of the chute at the top of the machine. Currently they will just fall on the floor -- we'll fix that in a moment.

Collecting the Product

We need another conveyor to take the parts produced by the Punch. Add another two Conveyor Ends with a Conveyor Section between them, underneath the output chute of the Punch. Also add another Conveyor Drive to drive the new conveyor.



Now select a Packing Station from the Machines page and place it at the right end of the second conveyor, so that its chute lines up with the conveyor.



Using the Configure tool, click on the Packing Station and select Phunky Phrisbee as the product to be packed.

(Not yet implemented - the Packing Station will automatically default to packing Phunky Phrisbees.)

Running the Factory

Now the factory will do something useful! Click the Start button and watch what happens. The parts produced by the Punch should get collected and delivered to the Packing Station, where they will be put into the crate. When the crate is full (it holds 10 items by default), it will be shipped off and sold, and if all is well, you will earn some revenue from it.

To see this happening, switch to the Statistics screen and watch the figures for the Phunky Phrisbee. You should see the Number Sold and Revenue go up periodically. You can also check the Company page to see the overall balance between income and expenditure, although it'll be a while before you show a profit, because you need to recoup the equipment costs.

The amount of revenue earned depends on how accurately the product was made. A product that perfectly matches its specification will sell for its full retail price. If there are any flaws, it will sell at a progressively discounted price. If it's too badly flawed, it will sell for less than the price of the raw materials -- not a good situation.

If you see the Number Trashed of the product going up, it means that your products were so badly produced that nobody would buy them at any price, and they ended up as landfill. In that case, stop the factory and check the settings on your machines before you bankrupt the company!

Quality Control

Although we don't really need it for such a simple product, we'll add a Quality Control Station to learn how it works.

Adding a QC Station

Stop the factory and use the Move Tool to move the packing station and the right end of the second conveyor a few squares to the right (remember to move the Conveyor Drive as well).

Now select a QC Station from the Machines page and place it over the conveyor just before the packing station.



Use the Configure tool to set the QC Station to test Phunky Phrisbees.



Now run the factory. When a good part goes past the QC station, its green light will come on.



To see what happens when the QC station finds a bad part, use the Configure tool to temporarily change the Offset setting of the Punch to -3. This will cause the punching tool to miss the edge of the sheet and create parts with a flat on one side.




When the malformed part goes past the QC Station, the red light comes on and the part is placed on the table beside the station so you can take a look at it. Any part previously on the table gets dropped down the chute (and falls on the floor at the moment).


Inspecting Parts

Although it's fairly easy to see what's wrong with the part in this case, a more subtle error may not be so obvious. To get a detailed look at the part, select the Inspection Tool and click on the QC station. A badge with a magnifying glass appears next to the station to indicate that it has been selected for inspection.



Now, switch to the Inspection page. You will see a magnified view of the part currently on the QC Station table, overlayed on a diagram of the product specification. Correct pixels are outlined in green, and incorrect ones in red, making it easy to see where the errors are.



(If the above seems worse than it should be, it's because the QC Station is a bit stupid in the way it compares things. The flattened frisbee is only 23 pixels wide, whereas the pattern it's being compared against is 25 pixels wide. The centres of the bounding rectangles are being aligned, resulting in a lot of erroneous pixels down both sides. The customers buying your products are just as dumb, however, and will judge the quality in the same way.)

You can click on a pixel to find out its exact composition. The selected pixel is highlighted with a yellow or blue frame. The actual composition of the pixel and the required composition according to the product specification are displayed on the right.


Assembling Parts

Lets's try a slightly more complex product. You may want to start a new game for this, to give you a fresh factory new initial funding.

Go to the Products page and take a look at the Mojo Mallet. This product was originally developed for the Ukranian Croquet Club, who are take their croquet very seriously. It has a high-strength verdium-ruddium alloy head, and a resilient easy-grip handle. Since its initial launch in the Ukraine, a considerable demand for it has arisen worldwide, so we're going into mass production.

This product consists of two parts, a 12x6 head and a 2x20 handle. The handle is easy, because it's a standard sheet size, but we'll have to punch the head out of a larger sheet.

Start with a supply hopper near the bottom left corner of the factory, and set it to deliver 20x10 sheets of R3G12 (the composition of the head). Build a conveyor out from it far enough to reach a punch.



Add a Punch and set it to punch out 12x6 rectangles. Build a conveyor to take the parts produced by the punch.



Now add a second supply hopper, positioned so that there are exactly 2 squares of space between the bottom of the new hopper and the top of the previous conveyor. Set it to supply 2x20 sheets of R11.
Build a conveyor out to the same distance as the last one.



Now it's time to put the parts together. Add an Assembly Robot positioned between the top two conveyors, to the right of the punch.



Before going any further, it's instructive to run the factory at this point and see what happens. The Assembly Robot waits for a part to arrive on the upper conveyor, picks it up and moves it around to the lower conveyor. Then it waits for a part to arrive on the lower conveyor, joins them together, and drops the assembled part back on the conveyor.



You'll notice that the result doesn't look quite right. To get a better look, extend the middle conveyor a bit further, add a QC station, and configure it to inspect Mojo Mallets. Wait for the QC station to reject a part, then click on the QC station with the inspection tool and go to the Inspection page.




It's rather a mess, because the robot has joined the the parts together in the wrong position. Pixels where the handle overlaps the head have got munged together, turning them yellow.



To fix this, we need to configure the X Offset and Y Offset of the assembly robot. These govern the position of the part from the upper conveyor relative to the one from the lower conveyor. Our parts need to be joined like this, so we need to set the X Offset to 5 and the Y Offset to 6.



Now run the factory again, and you should get a much better result. All you need to do now is add a packing station and start raking in the income!



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