Our Matt recently had the chance to visit the Sony factory in Pencoed, Wales, to see where Raspberry Pi computers are made. Not many people get the chance to tour the factory floor, so he filmed his visit so you can at least pretend you were there.

The boxing-up robot is my personal favourite. I also reckon we need to name the pick-and-place robots you see at the 18 second mark. There are four of them, so we’ll need a theme that ties them together. Drop your ideas in the comments and I will declare a winner who will receive my gratitude as a prize; along with my solemn promise to pester our friends at Sony until they make plaques of the inappropriate names I liked best.

I’m more of a reader myself

If you’d prefer to read about the factory processes, here is the video transcript:

“Let’s see how Raspberry Pi computers are made.

We’re at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Wales. It all starts with a warehouse of parts.

Many of those parts, including the printed circuit boards, get fed into pick-and-place machines. They start to populate the smaller parts on the boards first.

In between many of the steps, there’s a visual inspection of the boards to make sure everything looks good.

For the larger parts like the USB and Ethernet jacks, these robots place the parts and then after that solder is applied from below.

What’s cool is that they even use Raspberry Pis to do all kinds of things on the factory line.

There’s another inspection before the boards are broken up, and then each board is booted up for testing.

If they pass, they move along to be boxed up individually, weighed to make sure everything is in there and then packed into larger boxes for shipping.

These boxes go to customers and approved resellers all over the world. Our friends at Sony have a lot of Raspberry Pis to make, so I’m going to get out of their way now and let them do their thing.

Thanks for coming along with me.”

Extra factory fun

Matt posted a slightly longer edit to his personal TikTok if you’d like to see a snippet of the journey to Wales as well as the factory tour.

And if it’s a wander down memory lane you’re after, check out these photos from over ten years ago, taken by Liz during a tour in the very, very early days of Raspberry Pi.