Surviving a chip shortage
summary
Tomra documents and replaces blocked MCUs, reworks firmware and hardware so new boards behave identically to old ones, and ships without halting production. The team builds module test racks that run 1,000 module tests on real boards, runs month‑long market tests, and moves five cabinets into continuous integration. The company needs about 100,000 microcontrollers/year, finishes a module rewrite in ~5–6 months, has replaced six modules in a year, and reports stable production and far fewer field failures.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Start
- 0:31Reverse Vending Machines
- 7:55Component shortage
- 10:22The way through
- 14:27Stepper Motor Module
- 33:24Technology
- 35:00High level overview
- 36:43Link-time platform abstraction
- 37:54Abstract base classes
- 38:44Factory functions for module types
- 43:22Panic
- 44:55Code in flux
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