Introduction

In the first kit five machines worked at the same pace, and even so the die took away part of the factory's output. In a real plant machines are never the same: one is always slower than the others. Goldratt called such a machine the constraint, and in everyday speech it is called the bottleneck — like the neck of a bottle, through which water flows no faster than its narrowest place allows.

In this kit you make one machine slow — it will be our Herbie — and build the electronics that copes with it:

• lesson 1 — Herbie: machine 3 takes 2 seconds per part; we watch how the factory responds;
• lesson 2 — the idle meter: a button chooses a machine, a display shows how many seconds it stood without work. A CD4017 chooses the machine, a multiplexer of AND and OR gates takes its BUSY signal, two CD4029 count the seconds;
• lesson 3 — release at Herbie's rhythm: a frequency divider on a CD4013 flip-flop and a CD4019 rhythm selector;
• lesson 4 — the experiment: which machine is worth speeding up.

The electronics is the main thing here: every circuit is an instrument an engineer uses to control and measure the factory. Goldratt explains why that instrument is needed.

What you need

The built kit FL-01 «The Dice Game» — this kit is built on top of it: the same factory, the same panel, the same displays. If you don't have it yet, build it from the FL-01 book.

Chips — the kit file flow-chips.json, imported into the library with one button. It holds everything from FL-01 plus five real Texas Instruments chips of the CMOS 4000 series: CD4017 (pointer counter), CD4071 (OR), CD4072 (4-input OR), CD4013 (two D flip-flops) and CD4019 (selectors).

How long

Four lessons. Lesson 1 is one click, lessons 2 and 3 are one Cmd+I insert each, lesson 4 is three shifts of three minutes.