tech tips viewers we are coming to you live from japan
not live live in fact by the time you're watching this i'll not only have come
back from japan but also traveled somewhere else and probably be back from
there too so not live but definitely
from japan i can prove it look that's japan and we're wearing these robes so clearly
we're not lying and today we did something pretty exciting courtesy of
logitech we got to tour the omron factory
right here in japan where they make the
roamer g switches in logitech's g910
orion spark keyboard and it was
actually a lot more interesting than i thought it would be it was kind of
awesome stay tuned
so the tour kind of began in the lobby and what i didn't actually know when we
showed up was that omron actually makes a ton of different types of switches so
automotive factory automation and then kind of what we're mainly interested the
more consumer side of things i thought they just made like mouse switches and
and not even then they have a whole bunch of different categories for the types of switches that they have with
these little delightful characters so they have rocker tactile miniature
special sub mini and ultra mini and they
all have their own little like i think rocker's the cutest one well
probably she kind of looks like a pirate except i think that's just supposed to
be an eye yes yeah so not really pirate but either way
they're they're supposed to be superhero characters and i i think that's actually
pretty awesome so next up actually right next to the lobby was the Labs which we
creatively called lab one and lab two that two it's amazing uh so lab one we
didn't look at too much that's where they do uh rojas which is like basically
keeping hazardous stuff out of the products apparently very important uh
validation as well as new material development and then lab two which was
where all the super crazy bananas stuff that we somewhat recognized was and was
the only one that actually had anyone in it today although it was one person
sitting at the scanning electron microscope looking at one thing so
apparently nothing failed that day no they have a ton of a crazy expensive
machinery in here including multiple electron microscopes like you just said
x-ray machines all this kind of stuff one of them was 50 million yen another
one was 10 million yen and the total cost of that whole lab just lab 2 was 15
million us dollars just in case just in case something dies and you need
to know exactly why down to
the tiny tiny
sub microscopic scale the 15 million just in case lab
so then we had the meeting where everyone introduced themselves
twice very formal very formal we watched a
video it was an excellent video and ensures products of consistent
quality other products for factory automation and industrial applications
represent approximately good video omron very good video omron next time you want
to make a video come talk to us come talk to us first we can help you out a
little bit we'll sort that out for you guys and then it was finally time to get
suited up i think the best part of this for me was a that they even had
yes official omron branded like kimonos
and then the second best part for me was when luke tried to put on the
one-size-fits-all for japanese people slippers before we
went into the lab that didn't really work out also my kimono was really short
priceless flood kimono just in case there's a tsunami you're ready for it i'm oh
okay we're going there
wow once we're inside the factory i was
actually blown away by how loud it was there was a lot going on so
much stuff happening all the machines are running like some factories you'll
enter and it's like oh they're only running two or three lines right now it's like nope onron is 100 all the time
it's crazy so we made our way to the
very first step in the manufacture of a roamer g-switch where they had like a
metal big metal spool feeding into a machine
um that would then split it in two and
then punch out the like main design
yeah and then from there it actually goes on to a new reel that then gets
carried somewhere else in the factory so that's like some cutting edge technology
real to real that's a joke
so the next station is where things actually got pretty interesting and i started learning things i did not know
about romer g switches so there's a couple machines here and at the first
sort of functional station in the first one it basically places a little like
super tiny wire the second station actually checks to make sure that it's
there that's probably a good thing the third one forms it and tries to get it
within tolerances and then the fourth one checks again but
with imagery to make sure that it's exactly all laid out how it should be
and then there's a second machine
and that entire machine's job is to put another entire set
of these contact points on which is something i didn't realize
about romer g switches all switches will have a contact point but like we just
said there's two sets on this one so if you happen to get dust or some other
type of material on one of the contact points causing it to fail the other one
could still work and you wouldn't even notice that there's anything wrong with your keyboard so there's a redundant
actual actual actuation which
a few things that you were pointing out which is the differences between japanese manufacturing and german yeah
because we've seen a few factories now two german ones and one japanese and
there's no doubt that the germans and the japanese are the most likely of
anyone in the world to let us see their factory because they're clean they're
efficient they're organized and they're world-renowned for being great
manufacturers but we noticed a fundamentally different philosophy
the germans on the one hand are like kind of measure 50 times make sure it's
absolutely perfect cut once yeah and you look at the cherry mx switch there's
only one point of failure but the things don't die yeah whereas the roamer
g-switch in omron i mean maybe
and maybe they do but maybe they kind of accept that
one of those contact points could fail possibly possibly it could but hey if it
does well there's two so we built that redundant scene for you and another
thing i learned about romer g's at this station is this is a freaking expensive
switch the amount of metal in that thing unreal
another real joke but when they let us into a completely
different building for the next thing that's what we knew
was getting real that's another real
okay anyways the first station it pulls those contacts that we were just working
with downwards cleans them up a little bit and i was fascinated by that yeah
you were and then we saw the most innovative human machine
i've ever seen ever i didn't realize that every romer g switch is literally
made by people standing next to each other moving them along the production line
until they're finally blown into the little trays for delivery to logitech by
yours truly bet you didn't know that either actually that's a bad joke too
there's a real machine behind all the people that yeah every roamer g-switch
does not come with some Linus dna you're fine this is legitimately the coolest
piece of manufacturing equipment i have yet
seen this thing is balls to the walls bananas and there's two full lineups of
them so station number one of this monster takes all that metal from before
that frankly i was wondering how they get all that innocent yeah i was pretty
worried about that uh so takes all that before cuts it and
then positions the folded cut pieces vertically a real space saver next up
those pieces aren't actually aligned properly so it turns it and then kind of
mushes them together for that awesome redundancy that these switches have next
that whole thing gets picked up and then placed into the housing that is fed via
a hopper system from the back with like vibration
feeding and then like an automated orientation checking thing that's
actually pretty cool pretty ridiculous next up was lubrication so there's
actually the lubrication station there's actually
three different lubrication drops you are the lubrication officer and that is
where it gets a lot of its 70 million key press validation from is this
lubrication will last that entire time so after a quick qc stage not the final
one by any means at all we get to see the little rod that aids light
transmission added to the switch so
what's so special about the romer g is that the led actually shines up from the
middle through this uh light dispersing
rod and then evenly illuminates the entire top of the key switch a big
advantage over other mechanical keyswitches in the market which are only
able to effectively illuminate about half of the switch making them a little
less a little less even looking for lack of a better word
next up is where we get a lot of the feel of the switch from so at first we
add the spring which just kind of gets placed there and then immediately
afterwards they have the two blue and white pieces fed from hoppers in the
back and then placed together kind of behind the main assembly line and then
those two pieces go on top of the spring compressing it all the way down and that
blue piece is just kind of the top uh housing of the switch then the white
piece is actually a large plunger this is again where you get a lot of the feel
from of a roamer g after the top and bottom housing are
clamped together it's time for the final qc check the switch is pretty much done
so it's grabbed and then it moves through a number of stations so at the
first one it's uh warmed up if you know what i mean
and at the second one it goes through an electronic validation of how the switch
press feels to an electronic ARM then it goes
into a like a laser engraving slash
photo validation chamber and if it passes the validation it gets a laser
etching on the side of the part number and the manufacturing date where it is
finally taken off the qc carousel dropped onto an assembly line
belt and then blasted actually it's awesome i love the little air blast
blasted by air into the correct tray
inside one of the bins for eventual delivery to logitech
what a cool cool piece of machinery definitely one
of the best automated assembly lines i've ever seen
we haven't seen that many that's true for those of you wondering what happens
to those switches that didn't make it to the conveyor belt of epic awesome win
well they are validated as failed and then pulled off the line immediately and
sorted by why they failed so if there's a main reason why a whole bunch of
switches are failing they'll know exactly what's going on they can take
those back to the lab they also don't get a laser engraving at all so if your
keyboard for some reason had no laser markings on the bottom it's made out of
failed switches that someone somehow managed to obtain from a dumpster behind
omron and you should probably get that checked out yeah
speaking of checking out we're checking out and so uh the only folks left to
talk to you are actually some pretty important guys that we met here from
both logitech and omron who want to talk about a little bit more behind the
scenes what exactly got into their heads when
they went oh yeah well let's just take
gaming mechanical key switches and completely reinvent them
which i actually discussed quite deeply with one of them while naked in a hot
spring did you really i did that's hot
it is it was
so logitech was looking at the market and we saw that there wasn't a
mechanical switch that was built specifically for a gaming application
omron is well known throughout the world for building mechanical switches so that
seemed like a natural partner to build a gaming switch from the ground up
here
the this project took us about the two and two and a half or three years to
finish the adjective tool for building the aromagy switches is for
live longer move faster and much
brighter than the one we have today the actuation distance went to 1.5
millimeters instead of two it gives you an advantage within the context of a
game to do your action much more quickly than your opponent we increased the
durability by 40 over a standard mechanical switch that's out on the
market today up to 70 million activations and in regards to
reliability there are two activation points so as you're pushing down even if
one fouls the other one will continue activation so there's no risk of a a
lost action in a gaming environment
my