On 2/18/21 3:53 AM, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
--------
Bob kb8tq writes:
Turning an “idea” into a production capable part involves making many
batches of test samples. Think in the thousands of batches and hundreds
of parts in each batch. You have a “search” process at the blank chopping
level. You also have a search at the resonator fabrication level. Getting the
chopping part right is only a small part of the whole process….
I realize this used to be a manual process, but today I would expect
that you could automate a lot, of not most of it, if you wanted to ?
That was my first thought, and then I thought through all the steps. I
think it would be challenging to automate (and that brings up your
question below about "is it worth it?")
First, are you starting with natural or grown quartz? ( While grown
quartz is used for most crystals, isn't there some performance benefit
from natural crystals?)
I assume there is some sort of process to create "bars" of quartz from
the raw boules or crystals.
I believe you'd need to do some analysis to determine the crystal axes
and then the bars go into a series of saw steps - those might be
automateable, in terms of sawing angles - is the sawing with a wire,
with a diamond blade, or these days, perhaps abrasive water jet? That
would give you a bunch of slabs with the cut with the right angles - I'm
sure the machine they use today probably dumps them in a hopper, and
I've watched enough food packaging shows to know that you could get
those fairly large slabs onto a conveyor.
Then you'd have to cut your desired crystal shapes out of the slab
(whether round, rectangular, or some other shape) - another sawing or
grinding step, I assume.
And then mount in a holder automatically.
All the individual steps are sort of "mass production" but I think
today, there's significant (manual) setup time for the machine between
steps (kind of like making tiny screws on a Swiss Screw Machine - some
time for setup, then feed in bar stock and tiny screws or spacers come
out of the machine)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhwUHgWzzKs
It would still be a lot of work, and very expensive, but like
biochemist trying out hundred of thousand compounds from their
"libraries", robots really lower the cost.
Lot of work, I think, underestimates the magnitude of the task. It would
be interesting to compare the processes used for creating high
performance crystals (e.g. for a USO, where they start 1000 blanks to
get a dozen or so oscillators) and those used for mass production of
crystals for things like kitchen timers and microcontrollers. I have
heard that for USOs, there's a couple people who have the "knack" for
installing the crystal in the holder in a way that minimizes the
stresses, etc. That is *really hard* to automate.
This is, of course, where SiLabs has a thing - they make hundreds (if
not thousands) of MEMs oscillators at once with lithography, so the
piece parts are very inexpensive - but they're performance limited by
the material.
The real question must therefore be, if anybody reasonably expects
there to be any superior "new" cuts to find in the first place ?
What properties would you program a quartz-crystal-prototyping robot to search
for ?
Which parameter(s) of current crystal-cuts are "their weak point" ?
_______________________________________________
time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected]
To unsubscribe, go to
http://lists.febo.com/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts_lists.febo.com
and follow the instructions there.
