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Facebook's new hardware lab is built with connecting the world in mind

By Marcus Wong - on 8 Aug 2016, 11:56am

Facebook’s new hardware lab is built with connecting the world in mind.

 

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has just posted about the opening of the biggest and most advanced hardware lab in Facebook’s history – Area 404. 

A 22,000 square-foot dedicated hardware lab in Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park California, the lab is half the size of a football field and has everything from a 5-axis water jet that can cut through steel and granite to a 9-axis mill-turn lathe, allowing the Facebook R&D team to do the majority of their modeling, prototyping, and failure analysis in-house. This cuts down the time spent at the development cycle from weeks down to days at every stage, and thus represents a great leap in productivity.

Apart from the easy access to new machinery in a single location, Area 404 also has space for all of Facebooks R&D teams to work together. There are over 50 work benches in the main area, allowing engineers from various teams to come together to share their expertise.

The lab will consist of two main areas: the electrical engineering labs and the prototyping workshops. The former allows space and equipment for the various teams to test and debug their designs, while the latter is stocked with a variety of machine tools that will allow teams to quickly process multiple levels of the design process. For those interested, here’s a short list of some of the new equipment:

  • 9-axis mill-turn lathe, used for making complex components that require tight tolerance turning features and milling features on a single part, like our custom-designed, two-axis gimbal for air-to-air and air-to-ground laser communications. With this machine, we can make these parts in one setup and in low volume production; without this machine, parts would have to be machined in multiple setups on multiple machines, which is slow and error-prone.
  • 5-axis vertical milling machine, capable of producing extremely large, complex, and accurate prototypes by machining with all five axes simultaneously. This machine allows us to create large and extremely complex geometry — like parts associated with Terragraph — rapidly.
  • 5-axis water jet, capable of cutting full 10' x 5' sheets of material, including aluminum, steel, granite, stone, etc. The jet is powerful enough to cut through a sheet of one of these materials that is several inches thick.
  • Sheet metal shear and folder, two machines used for sheet metal prototyping. The folder is a CNC machine that can be programmed to bend complex sheet metal components, such as the components making up our custom-built server racks.
  • CNC fabric cutter, used to cut any fabric quickly and accurately based on a 2D engineering design.
  • Coordinate measuring machine (CMM), used to inspect prototypes to ensure they are within specifications that are calculated by the engineer. The machine is also capable of reverse-engineering a part and turning it into a 3D computer model.
  • Electron microscope and CT scanner, used for examining components for failure analysis and can produce 3D, X-ray images for inspection. During prototyping, it's important that we can pinpoint where to make improvements.

Moves like this really make apparent Facebook’s dedication to their proclaimed goal of making the world more "open and more connected". As with everything though, we’ll have to wait and see exactly what new technologies they create, and how they release them to public before we pass judgement. 

Sources: Facebook, Facebook Code Blog, CNBC.com 

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