Manufacturing Day 2013
Last Friday was Manufacturing Day -- we love our Production team so we joined in the celebration!
Last Friday (October 4) was Manufacturing Day. What is Manufacturing Day, you ask? It's a day devoted to addressing common misperceptions about manufacturing, by giving manufacturers an opportunity to open their doors and show, in a coordinated effort, what manufacturing is — and what it isn’t. By working together during and after the event, manufacturers will begin to address the skilled labor shortage they face, connect with future generations, take charge of the public image of manufacturing, and ensure the ongoing prosperity of the whole industry.
Today, we wanted to share a video we made to celebrate Manufacturing Day and the hard work that SparkFun could not exist without (and the perks that come with working on our production floor. Also - break-dancing).
ReplaceMeOpen
ReplaceMeClose
Manufacturing sure ain’t what it used to be. Gone are the days where every manufacturing job meant backbreaking and/or dangerous labor. Though a great amount of skill is still required these days to produce consistently high-quality products in large volumes, many production environments are now equipped with both safer materials and high-precision, lower-force robotics that allow us to build more intricate devices than ever before.
Here at SparkFun, we embrace our robotic friends that work tirelessly to help us produce thousands of circuit boards and electronics kits each day for the innovators, tinkerers, creative technologists, and tech education providers all across the world. We appreciate our machines for their quirks (robots aren’t perfect, you know) so long as they don’t frown upon our own. True to our D.I.Y. ethos, we have always believed that it is far more satisfying to manufacture our own product designs rather than outsource them to someone else. And, as is to be expected, we have learned many valuable lessons as the demand for our circuit boards and kits has grown over the years. But through those lessons, we continue to improve. We believe that our success lies in our openness to trying new things, dedicating ourselves to an insatiable appetite for high quality products, and being true to who we are without regard for “industry norms.”
It is always rewarding to see the endless stream of amazing projects from the D.I.Y. community come to life, with the circuit boards and kits that we personally built here in Boulder, CO, playing a small role in those creations! A big thank you to those of you who share with us and the world what you have built and what you have learned through your own designing and building! And thank you for being as truly unique and geeky as we are.
Catduino.
Somehow I don't think my cat would approve...
I click play for the video and get the 9/27/13 new product post
Might be some kind of cookie issue. Working fine for me. Trying clearing your cookies/cache.
Edit: it had something to do with the playlist being uploaded. We're fixing it right meow.
I think a live webcam feed from the manufacturing floor of Sparkfun is the best idea I have heard in a long time.
So what happens when someone brings a cat ? :)
A Furry Walking Static Generator in a warehouse of static sensitive parts. With dogs present. Yeah. That'll generate more excitement than Free day. Meow!
Static Kitty
It would be cool if you guys had a live webcam feed of the manufacturing floor and some of your robots doing their robot thing...