Xbox Manufacturing Process Pictures
From Xbox-Linux
This page explains some of the manufacturing process of the Xbox. The pictures have been taken at the Flextronics factory in Hungary, which produced 1.0 Xboxes from October 2001 to April 2002 (see Xbox Manufacturing Process), by an unknown photographer. The pictures had been found by Andy and published on Xbox Manufacturing Facility, http://andy.saturn9.ws/Photo%20Albums/Xbox%20Manufacturing%20Facility/ (http://andy.saturn9.ws/Photo%20Albums/Xbox%20Manufacturing%20Facility/).
If you can help, please click edit and add your thoughts. Please do not renumber the pictures, though.
This is the factory in Sárvár/Hungary, which manufactured everything except for the actual board logic, which had been made in the Zalaegerszeg factory. The TSOP has already been flashed at Zalaegerszeg; but the EEPROM will be written by XMTAXBOX during hard disk duplication.
There are at least these four rooms:
- case manufacturing
- four assembly lines
- hard disk duplication
- component storage
| Table of contents |
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1.1 3 |
Case Manufacturing
3
4
5
6
the jewel is applied onto the case
7
Next the heat shield is being prepared to be installed to the underbelly of the case
9
10
11
12
13
14
the top part of the cases are stored for later use.
15
16
17
This man is handling the foam packing ends that cradle the xbox in its' consumer packaging.
18
19
There appear to be twelve machines in this photo that manufacture the plastic case. You can see a hopper full of Xbox jewels on the bottom left which is applying jewels to the finished case.
20
Assembly Lines
Room layout
Wall - Line 4 - Line 3 - Line 2 - Line 1 - Window
We know from the serial numbers that the Hungarian factory had four assembly lines. The pictures of the factory confirm this.
Line Layout
People have numbers, things have letters. The assembly line goes counterclockwise, starting with person 1.
1 | FFFF
AAAA | |
BBBB | | 7
2 | | EEEE
3 | |D6
CCCC |___| 5
4
A: USB connectors?
B: ?
C: power supply units
D: ?
E: front panels (in grey plastic boxes)
F: mainboards (for person 1)
1: fit mainboard, fit USB connectors?
2: ?
3: fit motherboard screws, add PSU?
4: add power/eject logic?
5: fit screws, attaching DVD power cable (board, PSU, USB already in place)
6: fit front panel
7: hand front panels to 6?
26
This is the beginning of line 4, at the very left of the room.
25
These are the beginning of lines 4 and 3 (on the right, you can see the same three people as on pictures 1, 23 and 24).
The people in blue seem to deliver the components to the lines by putting them on the blue roller conveyors.
The brown boxes contain hard disks, the white boxes motherboards, and the gray plastic boxes contain the bottom cases.
1
This is the beginning of line 3.
The white boxes contain motherboards. The people on the left work on open Xboxes with only the motherboard fitted. The man on the right stands in front of grey boxes with the bottom cases. The brown boxes on the bottom left contain the power supply units.
You can see the fan on the Northbridge on one Xbox, which confirms that these are V1.0 Xboxes.
The man on the right holds a front panel in his hands.
24
This is the beginning of line 3 (the same people are on picture 1).
The grey plastic boxes contain the bottom cases (see picture 1). The people on the left work on open Xboxes, probably without the DVD drive and hard disk fitted.
23
These are the beginnings of lines 3 (left) and 2 (right) the signs can be seen to the top left and right of the picture; the three people on the left can also been seen on pictures 1 and 24).
27
This is the beginning of line 2. These people seem to screw the motherboard into the bottom case and connect the DVD power cables (yellow cables in brown box just below the monitor). In the Xbox of the woman on the right, you can see the DVD power cable already connected.
(These are the same people as seen on the right of picture 23, so this line is located right of line 3, and this this is neither line 1 nor line 3 or 4 (compare pictures 1, 25 and 26), so it must be line 2.)
28
Beginning of line 2, left side (These are the same people as on picture 27).
2
Six work places each with a complete computer system (including keyboard) and a spindle with CDs/DVDs. The metallic box with the lever seems to connect power, video and possibly ethernet to the Xbox.
Some kind of QA (probably port testing) is likely done at this station. Hard disk duplication is done on photo 30, flash programming is most probably not done with the case closed.
21
The woman in the front works at the PC stations (picture 2) and seems to store away an Xbox after the procedure performed at this station. The brown boxes on the bottom right seem to contain Hard-Disk Drive anti-static bags.
On the top right, there are complete Xboxes with the top cover missing. It seems the woman in the top of the picture puts the top cover on.
The poster with the blue frame on the very left is the one that can be seen on picture 22.
22
On the right, we see the top cover, the DVD drive and the hard disk, as well as the bottom (blue).
The date reads 2001.09.03, i.e. September 2001. The factory started production no later than October 4th 2001. "MunkautasÃtás" is Hungarian and means "work standard".
Hard Disk Duplication
30
There are 24 Xboxes (closed) in every rack, obviously connected to the blue 24x switch. At this point, the hard disk images are probably sent to the (finished) boxes. There must be a DVD in the drive that contains the application to receive the data and write it to disk, as the Xboxes are closed and there is no LPC ROM override. The fact that there is a spindle with CDs/DVDs mounted on every rack supports this theory.
Hard disk duplication seems to be done independent of the assembly lines in a separate room.
Testing
33
On the right, we see a scanner that can be used to avoid mis-typing in the serial number, as the serial number sticker also contains a barcode. The green discs in the picture are the install/refresh discs. It's ironic that the work is being performed on a Sony TV.
34
Packing
31
This seems to be the end of every assembly line.
32
Storage
29
These are probably wrapped Xboxes. One brown box contains four Xboxes, so one pallet contains 72 Xboxes. There are about 100 pallets on this pictures, which is 7200 Xboxes. Back then, they had a value of more than 2 million EUR. But they weigh 30 tons, in case you were considering stealing them.
