Facebook announced the opening of a 22,000-square-foot hardware lab at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
CNC (computer numerical control) model maker Spencer Burns and mechanical and power manager Mikal Greaves said in a blog post that the new facility contains state-of-the-art machine tools and test equipment, which will enable Facebook to more rapidly prototype hardware in-house for initiatives including Oculus VR, Facebook Connectivity Lab, Building 8 and general infrastructure.
Burns and Greaves said the hardware lab has two main areas: electrical engineering labs and prototyping workshops.
The electrical engineering labs allow various teams to test and debug their designs, and they feature custom equipment setups to match the products being developed. The prototyping workshops contain machine tools enabling teams to ?quickly iterate on complex problems,? including:

A nine-axis mill turn lathe
A five-axis vertical milling machine
A five-axis water jet
A sheet metal shear and folder
A CNC fabric cutter
A coordinate measuring machine
An electron microscope and CT scanner

Burns and Greaves also offered a look at why the lab was created:
Hardware engineering traditionally happens behind closed doors, in isolated labs. We fell into this pattern ourselves early on at Facebook, as we opened individual hardware labs to support new teams. Some of our first labs?including one in a repurposed mail room, in our old Palo Alto (Calif.) headquarters?were built for our infrast...