In preparation for our full rollout at our contract manufacturer, Worthington Assembly, I spent a bunch of time honing The Public Radio's mechanical assembly & fulfillment processes - organizing the workspace, testing each error check, scanning random shampoo bottles to make sure a weird barcode doesn't screw things up. The processes and tools we've developed will inevitably evolve yet, but at the current setup is solid.

So, video documentation!

Mechanical assembly

We begin by taking in printed circuit board assemblies and making mechanical assemblies. We typically do this in batches of 18, and once a batch is done they're scanned into inventory and put in a tray on a shelf:

Obviously, the mechanical assembly step is *not* done just in time; a mechanical assembly might sit on the shelf for a day or a week before its time comes. Then comes:

Order fulfillment

This is where the real engineering comes in. Here we have multiple systems - Tulip, our order management database, and a bunch of scripts & custom hardware to round things off.

So, two videos!

I gotta say - it's a pretty cool process :)