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| April 02, 2024 | Volume 20 Issue 13 |
Manufacturing Center
Product Spotlight
Modern Applications News
Metalworking Ideas For
Today's Job Shops
Tooling and Production
Strategies for large
metalworking plants
Novotechnik has put together an informative video highlighting real-world applications for their RFC, RFE, and RSA Series touchless magnetic angle sensors. You may be surprised at the variety of off-highway, marine, material handling, and industrial uses. You'll learn how they work (using a Hall effect microprocessor to detect position) and their key advantages, including eliminated wear and tear on these non-mechanical components. We love when manufacturers provide such useful examples.
View the video.
Autodesk Assistant brings industry-specific context to help execute tasks and orchestrate actions across your 3D models -- not just answer questions. Designed to understand your workflows, Assistant appears as a dockable panel alongside your Inventor workspace and includes the ability to perform complex tasks or gather information from your designs without writing a single line of code. Find out what this new AI "colleague" can do for you.
Watch this informative Autodesk video.
Seifert StripLite SL 4000 Series LED enclosure lighting provides bright illumination to 700 lumens. On/off switch and motion sensor models are available. Easily daisy chain up to 16 light strips. Magnetic or clip mounting. See video/info on website or contact Bristol Instruments for more information.
Learn about snap-together lighting.
Beckhoff's Next line of multi-touch control panels and panel PCs is engineered for demanding human-machine interface and control tasks. These panels offer convenient operation with advanced multi-touch technology, a high-quality look and feel, anti-glare and anti-ghosting effects, and a wide choice of formats (from 7 to 23.8 in.) and options. A main draw is the line's attractive pricing.
Learn more.
Creaform, a business of AMETEK, has launched HandySCAN 3D|EVO Series, the most powerful handheld 3D laser scanning solution on the market. This innovative series features a built-in touchscreen display and an integrated high-res 12-MP photo camera, incorporating augmented reality (AR) and advanced on-scanner visualization. Users can streamline repetitive inspections and enhance quality control processes using the new auto-alignment feature. Powered by 46 blue laser lines with accuracy of 0.020 mm. The Creaform Metrology Suite includes four application software modules: Scan-to-CAD, Inspection, Automation, and Dynamic Tracking. So many more features.
Learn more.
Global automotive supplier Continental has developed a new sensor technology that measures the temperature inside permanently excited synchronous motors in electric vehicles directly on the rotor for the first time.
Read the full article.
The new OCI-460 SWIR LED series from EPIGAP OSA Photonics features markedly improved output power compared to the company's previous OCI-480 package and all competitive SMD SWIR LED devices. For example, model OCI-460 ID1550-XS operates at 1,550 nm and features drive current up to 1.5A to deliver approximately 13% higher output efficiency over EPIGAP's OCI-480 package. This impressive advancement features 96% higher output power compared to any other SWIR SMD LED currently on the market. Ideal for use in sensing, machine vision, and more.
Learn more.
Discover AURA, the new AI assistant built into SOLID-WORKS, in this informative video from TriMech Group. What can AURA do for you? It can streamline workflows and make collaborating on and tracking projects even easier, for starters. Other top features of SOLIDWORKS Design 2026 are also covered. Some good tips here.
View the TriMech Group video.
Automation-Direct now offers Sensy 2172L series single point, 5510 series shear beam, and 2782 series tension/compression load cells that deliver flexible solutions for weighing and force measurement. They are ideal for applications ranging from small packaging scales to rugged industrial tanks and conveyor systems. Built from aircraft-grade aluminum or stainless steel, these models feature built-in overload protection, accuracies down to 0.03% of full scale, protection ratings up to IP67, and capacities up to 2,000 kg.
Learn more.
Seifert's new SLIMLINE NEO ushers in next-generation industrial cooling with natural refrigerant R290 (GWP 0.02) and high-efficiency inverter technology. It cuts energy costs with EER up to 3.6, reduces refrigerant charge by 75%, and extends electronics life. A fully redesigned, lighter, smaller enclosure delivers lower vibration, better component protection, and easier handling. Available in two elegant surfaces: stainless steel and mild steel, powder coated.
Learn more.
Coin cell supercapa-citors are compact, high-capacity energy storage devices that rapidly charge and discharge and endure far more cycles than rechargeable batteries. They're ideal for high switching loads such as real-time clock and battery back-up power, battery-swap ride-through, and LED or audible alarms. SCHURTER's latest versions support up to 5.5 V and 100 to 1,500 mF.
Learn more.
Mastering bend calculations in sheet metal design is a key skill that can impact the accuracy and manufactur-ability of your designs significantly. Explore the various options available to become a pro in this Onshape Tech Tip: K Factor, bend allowance, and bend deduction, with guidance on when each should be used. You will probably learn something even if you don't use this software.
Read the Onshape blog.
Ever wonder how private jets get overhauled from standard OEM layouts to exotic, artful interiors? It takes engineering expertise, specialty design skills, and true craftspeople. Increasingly, it also takes automation provided by middleware to weave a digital thread through CAD, BOM, ERP, and PDM software.
Read the full article.
Is AI really useful, or is it just a passing trend? Balavignesh Vemparala, an R&D Engineer II at ANSYS, lays out a compelling case for how artificial intelligence is already hard at work in the simulation world with real results for users. From faster solves to accelerated workflows, improved quality and traceability, generative models, and more, discover what you might be overlooking when it comes to real-world AI application. Worth the read.
Read this informative ANSYS blog.
From counting boxes on a conveyor and ensuring precise packaging and labeling to the automatic doors you walk through daily, learn all about photoelectric sensors and the options available from AutomationDirect. Did you know there are four main types? Familiarize yourself with their constructions, capabilities, and their main pros and cons. A good basic primer or refresh.
View the AutomationDirect video.
Cerebras Systems (Sunnyvale, CA), a pioneer in accelerating generative artificial intelligence (AI), has doubled down on its existing world record of fastest AI chip with the introduction of the Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3). The WSE-3 delivers twice the performance of the previous record holder, the Cerebras WSE-2, at the same power draw and for the same price.
Purpose built for training the industry's largest AI models, the 5-nm-based, 4-trillion-transistor WSE-3 powers the Cerebras CS-3 AI supercomputer, delivering 125 petaflops of peak AI performance through 900,000 AI optimized compute cores.

The third-generation 5-nm Wafer Scale Engine (WSE-3) from Cerebras Systems powers the industry's most scalable AI supercomputers -- up yo 256 exaFLOPs. [Credit: Cerebras ]
With a huge memory system of up to 1.2 petabytes, the CS-3 is designed to train next-generation frontier models 10 times larger than GPT-4 and Gemini. Cerebras says 24 trillion parameter models can be stored in a single logical memory space without partitioning or refactoring, dramatically simplifying training workflow and accelerating developer productivity. Training a one-trillion parameter model on the CS-3 is as straightforward as training a one-billion parameter model on GPUs.
The CS-3 is built for both enterprise and hyperscale needs. Compact four-system configurations can fine-tune 70B models in a day, while at full scale using 2,048 systems, Llama 70B can be trained from scratch in a single day, which Cerebras says is an unprecedented feat for generative AI.
The latest Cerebras Software Framework provides native support for PyTorch 2.0 and the latest AI models and techniques such as multi-modal models, vision transformers, mixture of experts, and diffusion. Cerebras remains the only platform that provides native hardware acceleration for dynamic and unstructured sparsity, speeding up training by up to eight times.
"When we started on this journey eight years ago, everyone said wafer-scale processors were a pipe dream. We could not be more proud to be introducing the third generation of our groundbreaking AI chip," said Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Cerebras.
With every component optimized for AI work, CS-3 delivers more compute performance at less space and less power than any other system. While GPUs' power consumption is doubling generation to generation, the CS-3 doubles performance but stays within the same power envelope. The CS-3 also offers superior ease of use, requiring 97% less code than GPUs for LLMs and the ability to train models ranging from 1B to 24T parameters in purely data parallel mode. A standard implementation of a GPT-3-sized model required just 565 lines of code on Cerebras -- an industry record.
Cerebras says it already has a sizable backlog of orders for CS-3 across enterprise, government, and international clouds.
"As a long-time partner of Cerebras, we are interested to see what's possible with the evolution of wafer-scale engineering. CS-3 and the supercomputers based on this architecture are powering novel scale systems that allow us to explore the limits of frontier AI and science," said Rick Stevens, Argonne National Laboratory Associate Laboratory Director for Computing, Environment, and Life Sciences.
"As part of our multi-year strategic collaboration with Cerebras to develop AI models that improve patient outcomes and diagnoses, we are excited to see advancements being made on the technology capabilities to enhance our efforts," said Dr. Matthew Callstrom, M.D., Mayo Clinic's medical director for strategy and chair of radiology.
Source: Cerebras
Published April 2024