When it comes to hacks, the best ones go to extremes. Either beautiful in their simplicity, or magnificent in their excess. And, well, today’s hack is the latter: excessive. [HTX Studio] built an assembly line for origami pigeons!
One can imagine the planning process went something like this:
- Make origami pigeon assembly line
- ?
- Profit
But whatever the motivation, this is an impressive and obviously very well engineered machine. Even the lighting is well considered. It’s almost as if it were made for show…
Now, any self-respecting nerd should know the difference between throughput and latency. From what we could glean from the video, the latency through this assembly line is in the order of 50 seconds. Conservatively it could probably have say 5 birds in progress at a time. So let’s say every 10 seconds we have one origami pigeon off the assembly line. This is a machine and not a person so it can operate twenty four hours a day, save downtime for repairs and maintenance, call it 20 hours per day. We could probably expect more than 7,000 paper pigeons out of this machine every day. Let’s hope they’ve got a buyer lined up for all these birds.
If you’re interested in assembly lines maybe we could interest you in a 6DOF robotic arm, or if the origami is what caught your eye, check out the illuminating, tubular, or self-folding kind!
Based on the video comments, they’re not planning to sell these but to give away to their followers (apparently on some other platform than YouTube).
This is a beautiful piece of industrial automation. Well done. What’s the hourly output? (Must have missed this in the comments)
Or just read the article…
Seems like the asian part of the internet has a lot more people building more elaborate stuff these days.
Hackaday should have international correspondents reporting what’s hot in the local hacking, electronics and DIY forums.
I have so many questions… mostly about time and money.
This is a perfectly beautiful and equally useless machine. Also, expensive. How does one have enough time and money to burn on such things? Youtube views can’t really pay THAT much…
If you are a studio doing custom assembly lines .. this is both stuff you have and need to get used to. Not 100% sure, but I consider this a portfolio piece.
Well, I’d put in some 5 cents and mention something about that the meaning of the word ‘useless’ heavily depends on culture.
Just like that the meaning of ‘my 5 cents’ heavily depends on culture. :)
He doesn’t make money from this in China, he just uses these videos to build his personal fame. In China, as long as you are famous, you can make more money than making machines, and it is easier to make money. For example, advertising, promoting other brands, and selling products for other companies.
Depends on the target audience. The article mentioned a potential use: for show. If HTX Studio is a prop/technical/mechanical design/assembly business, it’s a nice prop for attracting a crowd and potential customers and show off their skills and capabilities at a convention, show, or on-line media outlet.
If it could do cranes (the flying variety), I think there’d be a market for that.
That’s what I was thinking. I, for one, sure don’t want more pigeons.
Though, I don’t know if the paper cranes wedding tradition I’ve heard vaguely of is about having the cranes, or if it’s really about the people who (are willing/wanting to) fold cranes for you.