The second kit in the Flow series. One machine in the factory is slower than the rest — and the whole factory works at its pace. On top of the built kit FL-01 you build an idle meter on ready CMOS 4000 chips: a CD4017 counter picks a machine, a multiplexer made of AND and OR gates takes its BUSY signal, two CD4029 count the seconds without work — and the bottleneck is found by number, not by eye. A CD4013 flip-flop divider and a CD4019 selector feed parts at the bottleneck’s rhythm, and an experiment shows that only it is worth speeding up. With the history: the neck of a bottle, the utilization trap, Toyota’s andon and Goldratt’s five steps. 9 chips, 1,470 transistors.
This kit is free: all lessons are open, no sign-up needed.