Glass Half Full of Pinball Manufacturing

This week: Stern Pinball electromechanical ingenuity, local operating systems, industrial AI process manufacturing, in-space mobility infrastructure, Siemens Intelligence Center X, critical minerals

Jun 07, 2026

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

The enduring success of Stern Pinball offers valuable lessons in managing production complexity at the intersection of heritage craftsmanship and modern tech. While often perceived as a nostalgic pastime, manufacturing a pinball machine is an intensive engineering challenge that requires balancing thousands of unique parts within a highly constrained physical footprint. As an avid player myself, I closely followed Austin Weber’s coverage of Stern’s operational evolution and took away the following core lessons:

Intricate Packaging & Multi-Disciplinary Design: Each machine represents a dense engineering and spatial challenge. Design teams must integrate thousands of distinct parts, from mechanical solenoids to digital HD displays, within a fixed footprint. This requires tight synchronization between mechanical, electrical, and software engineering during a long development cycle.
The Physics of Quality Control: Because pinball is an entirely physical, physics-based experience, there is zero margin for error in geometry. A fraction of a degree in playfield tilt or a millimeter of deviation in a ramp’s placement completely alters the game’s flow, making precision physical placement a critical quality baseline.
Labor Efficiency Over Automation: Stern demonstrates that for certain high-complexity, high-variety products, manual craftsmanship remains superior to robotics. With 18 to 24 labor hours required per unit, the assembly line relies on highly organized human cells to navigate the unique wiring harnesses and mechanical subassemblies specific to each title.
Technological Convergence: A modern machine is a complex hybrid system. It must seamlessly balance legacy electromechanical feel (pop-bumpers and flippers) with modern digital infrastructure like IoT connectivity and advanced animatronics, forcing a design philosophy that respects tactile tradition while adopting modern software standards.
Operational Flexibility: Because the company juggles multiple high-profile pop-culture licenses and various model tiers (Pro, Premium, Limited Edition), the factory floor must remain highly agile. The lesson here is the value of a flexible manufacturing layout that can pivot production focus rapidly to align with real-time market demand.

Some of my favorite pinball machines over the years. I recommend stopping into the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas next time you’re there!

Assembly Line

This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

☀️ How One Man Powers a Global App from a Dutch Cow Barn

Just outside Amsterdam, a converted cow barn is quietly running a global payment app used by over a million people around the clock. To keep it online, Wietse Wind and his installer Danny built a massive 540 kWh LiFePO4 storage system with 150 solar panels, multiple Quattro-II and MultiPlus-II inverters, and full grid redundancy using Victron Energy equipment. This is the story of the largest residential ESS install either of them had ever built.

🐂 A North Dakota startup raised $10 million from ranchers and neighbours to build the operating system for beef cattle /TNW/

🎛️ State of Digital in Process Manufacturing

✍️ Author: Dimitris Paraskevopoulos

Prior IoT Analytics research, specifically on IoT use cases, has found that process manufacturers typically lag behind discrete manufacturers in adopting digital technologies. This is largely due to long asset replacement cycles (more than 50 years in some cases), among other reasons. Oil & gas, though, is often regarded as ahead of other process industries due to its remote nature, with established SCADA and remote connectivity architectures.
Smart sensors top the list of most deployed technologies for process manufacturers. Companies are also adopting bolt-on wireless sensors, such as US-based industrial AI company Augury’s bolt-on Halo sensors, which monitor machine parameters such as vibration, temperature, and magnetic field data and transmit insights to the cloud for AI-driven analysis.

🫙 AI for the Glass Industry

Georg Katzlinger explores the surprising complexity of the flat glass industry and the unique challenges it faces including how AI solutions are revolutionizing the way custom glass orders are processed, from deciphering handwritten requests to integrating with legacy ERP systems. Georg shares his journey from engineering to AI entrepreneurship, revealing why deterministic, human-in-the-loop automation is essential for manufacturers.

💿 A new way to build chips: Sequentially stacking silicon to extend Moore’s law

✍️ Author: Michael O’Boyle

The most efficient approach, known as monolithic three-dimensional integration, builds each layer directly on top of the previous one to maximize interlayer connectivity. However, achieving this has been a longstanding technical challenge. Preparing high-quality silicon and fabricating high-performance devices normally require processes operating at 1,000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to destroy the metal wiring. For upper layers beyond the first, the temperature constraint, or “thermal budget,” is strictly set to 400 degrees.
Current commercial three-dimensional chips are made by fabricating semiconductor devices on separate wafer substrates first and then bonding those wafers or dies together. While this approach has enabled successful products such as high-bandwidth memory and 3D V-Cache chips, it comes with substantial limitations. The alignment between layers is necessarily coarse, and the micron-scale vertical connections between layers called through-silicon via or TSV are relatively large and sparse.

Read more at University of Illinois and Nature

💿🤝 NVIDIA and TSMC Bring AI Into Fabs to Advance Semiconductor Design and Manufacturing /NVIDIA/

🚀 Tom Mueller: SpaceX’s #1 Employee Built the Merlin Engine. Now He’s Building Impulse Space

🚀 Impulse Space Raises $500M Series D to Build In-Space Mobility Infrastructure for the Space Economy /GlobeNewswire/

Constraint Capital #6 - June 2026

David Rogers

Jun 1

In his May 20th, 2026 interview on Invest Like The Best, Gavin Baker /X/ outlines several profound transformations and strategic maneuvers taking place within the AI infrastructure and data center landscape. Constraint Capital #6 tackles these maneuvers and the technology bottlenecks behind the SpaceX’s identified $28.5 trillion TAM /

Read full story

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

Siemens powers the next phase of industrial AI with Intelligence Center X

Siemens announced Intelligence Center X, new industrial AI orchestration software designed to help organizations turn industrial AI from isolated experimentation into scalable, real world business impact through a hybrid workforce where people and AI agents work together with shared context, workflows and lifecycle intelligence.

By connecting data, models and workflows on a single governed foundation, Intelligence Center X enables companies to deploy AI-driven applications and agents faster, with full traceability and control. Intelligence Center X combines the Mendix™ low-code platform with Siemens’ Graph Studio and AI Studio software from the Rapidminer® portfolio to create the enterprise context, business-specific lifecycle intelligence, and orchestrated agents and intelligent applications businesses needed to turn AI ambition into real value gains. Across industries, companies have invested in AI but are struggling to scale beyond pilots because data is fragmented, governance is inconsistent, and AI insight does not connect to real workflows. Intelligence Center X is designed to close that gap as the production-ready system that orchestrates people and AI agents together, on top of what enterprises already own, with full auditability and policy controls.

🖨️🛥️ Voltage Vessels and CEAD developed a demonstration platform using LFAM, which is informing Voltage Vessels’ basalt fiber-reinforced PETG material developments

✍️ Author: Grace Stubbins

Voltage Vessels (Maui, Hawaii, U.S.), a startup founded by Sam Young, has submitted a 6-meter 3D printed rigid hull inflatable boat (RHIB) prototype for U.S. maritime defense evaluation. The hull’s technical execution was led by CEAD (Delft, Netherlands), using its large-format additive manufacturing (LFAM) system — an industrial-scale printer used by multiple defense contractors for hull-scale composites production — and HDPro thermoplastic composite (TPC) materials.
Separate third-party testing commissioned by Voltage Vessels measured the materials’ tensile strength along the print direction at roughly 108 MPa, versus approximately 49 MPa for the HDPro composite used as a benchmark. Eclipse X9 also retained more than 90% of its strength after long-term saltwater immersion, with water absorption below 0.4%. Additional testing performed at the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center (UMaine ASCC) further validated the material’s mechanical performance under project ID UM-TC-23-1008.

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

🤝 Fanuc, Google advance industrial robotics as part of recent AI deals /Manufacturing Dive/

🇩🇪🦾 SoftBank in Early Talks to Back $800 Million Agile Robots Round

Agile Robots is in discussions to raise about $800 million in new funding from backers including SoftBank Group Corp., as investors seek out companies deploying artificial intelligence in real-world settings. SoftBank is in talks to contribute more than $300 million, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified as the information is private. The company previously led a funding round in Agile Robots.

🇮🇱 DriveNets secures $410 million in latest funding round, AMD joins as investor

DriveNets, an Israeli networking software firm, said it has raised $410 million in its latest funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners ‌and Atreides Management, taking its total capital-raise so far to $1 billion. New investors AMD and Red Dot Capital joined the round, while existing investors Pitango and D1 Capital Partners also participated. The company would ⁠use the proceeds to meet the surging demand for large-scale AI infrastructure, CEO Ido Susan said.
DriveNets allows telecommunications operators and data centers to build and manage networks using standard, off-the-shelf hardware, rather than costly proprietary systems. ⁠Its technology supports high-speed connectivity and AI workloads.

🇺🇸⛏️🧠 Terra AI raises $20M to Accelerate Mineral and Reservoir Exploration to Meet Global Critical Mineral and Energy Demands

Terra AI, the artificial intelligence platform helping solve subsurface uncertainty for mineral and energy development, announced it raised $20 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures and strategic investment from BHP Ventures.

Terra AI’s patented technology integrates nearly every type of exploration data to generate millions of geological models, enabling teams to evaluate a comprehensive range of potential subsurface scenarios. This allows project teams to identify the best drilling and geophysical approaches to reduce key uncertainty and rigorously assess project economics earlier than ever before. By going beyond geological visualization and delivering risk-quantified decision insights, Terra AI helps explorers on virtually every important decision across their portfolio from determining which assets to acquire in a portfolio to accelerating and de-risking resource development efforts. The outcome: resource pipelines are developed faster and more efficiently to help the world meet its resource needs.

🇺🇸👓 Phosio Raises $4 Million Seed Round to Bring Affordable AR/AI Glasses to Mass Market

Phosio announced the closing of a $4 million seed financing round to accelerate commercialization of its thin-film materials platform for next-generation AR/AI glasses. The round was led by MESH, with participation from Sierra Ventures, TEL Venture Capital, Silicon Catalyst Venture, Willamette Valley Capital, and Silicon Catalyst Angels.

As AI shifts from phones to ambient interfaces, the industry is racing toward lightweight, all-day wearable glasses. But optics and display costs remain the biggest barrier to mass adoption. Today’s AR/AI glasses rely on complex, costly display systems that are bulky, power-hungry, and difficult to manufacture at scale. Phosio’s proprietary thin-film platform integrates high-performance display functionality directly into lightweight, everyday eyewear, eliminating the cost, bulk, and power demands that have slowed mainstream adoption.

Constraint Capital #6 - June 2026

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