While earlier the various hardware needs and servers for facebook used to be designed across the various labs of the company, now has been consolidated in the headquarters based in California’s Menlo Park. It is known to be a lag that is the state of the art and has been named Area 404. This space has 50 workbenches which are placed over 22,000 Sqft. of space. This would be used to test and build prototype hardware by engineers.
The reason behind why the hardware lab is needed by Facebook is due to the fact that the company is coming up with new projects that require certain kinds of hardware to be developed. One such project is Aries, this is base station which is said to be wireless and at one time can service around 24 client devices.
The concept of coming up with such a project is to provide services to more and more clients at the same time. Apart from that, there is also a workshop that is meant for manual work, here right from the operating the machinery to various other chores, everything is done manually.
Apart from that there is also a precision cutting section using a 9 – axis. This is used in order to cut parts which are very complex such as the gimbal which is used for laser communications from the air to the ground and even on air itself. Along with that you will get to see the 5 axis water jet which is used for cutting granite, steel and even sheets of aluminum.
For the Terragraphic communications system of Facebook there is a vertical milling 5 axis machine that produces the prototype components and a CT scanner and electron microscope which is used to check up on parts which fail. This helps the company to find out what exactly is the matter and for inspection, there is also a 3D X-Ray machine.
