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What are Onshape Custom Features?

Certified Onshape Professional Too Tall Toby explains how to supercharge your workflow using community-created tools. In this insightful tutorial, he dives into the world of FeatureScript -- the powerful coding language behind Onshape. Learn where to find new scripts and how to use them. Save time. Learn new skills, shortcuts, and maybe even better ways to do things. Incorporate Custom Features into your everyday work. Very useful.
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What can you do with touchless magnetic angle sensors?

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.
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What can the new Autodesk Inventor AI Assistant do for you?

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.

Useful! Snap-together LED enclosure lighting

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.

Next-gen multi-touch panels

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.
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Most powerful handheld 3D laser scanner on the market

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.
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Continental develops first sensor to measure heat in EV motors

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.
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LEDs with highest output power available

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.
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AI and collaboration in SOLIDWORKS

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.

Solutions for weighing and force measurement

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.
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Top Product: Future-proof enclosure cooling

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 supercapacitors: High capacity, quick release

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.

Tech Tip: Mastering sheet metal bend calculations in Onshape

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.

Digital Engineering: How a private jet gets a high-end refurb

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.
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How AI is quietly transforming simulation

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.

Superheated gold overturns four decades of established theory

Researchers taking the first-ever direct measurement of atom temperature in extremely hot materials inadvertently disproved a decades-old theory and upended our understanding of superheating.

By Erin Woodward, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

It's notoriously difficult to take the temperature of really hot things. Whether it's the roiling plasma in our Sun, the extreme conditions at the core of planets, or the crushing forces at play inside a fusion reactor, what scientists call "warm dense matter" can reach hundreds of thousands of degrees kelvin.

Knowing precisely how hot these materials are is crucial for researchers to understand such complex systems fully, but taking these measurements has been, until now, virtually impossible.

Researchers at SLAC's Matter in Extreme Conditions (MEC) instrument used a laser to superheat a sample of gold. Then, they sent a pulse of ultrabright X-rays from the Linac Coherent Light Source through the sample to measure the speed, and thus the temperature, of the atoms vibrating in the sample. [Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory]

"We have good techniques for measuring density and pressure of these systems, but not temperature," said Bob Nagler, staff scientist at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. "In these studies, the temperatures are always estimates with huge error bars, which really holds up our theoretical models. It's been a decades-long problem."

Now, for the first time, a team of researchers report in the journal Nature that they have directly measured the temperature of atoms in warm dense matter fully. While other methods rely on complex and hard-to-validate models, this new method directly measures the speed of atoms, and therefore the temperature of the system. Already, their innovative method is changing our understanding of the world: In an experimental debut, the team superheated solid gold far beyond the theoretical limit, unexpectedly overturning four decades of established theory.

Nagler and researchers at SLAC's Matter in Extreme Conditions (MEC) instrument co-led this study with Tom White, associate professor of physics at University of Nevada, Reno. The group includes researchers from Queen's University Belfast, the European XFEL (X-ray Free-Electron Laser), Columbia University, Princeton University, University of Oxford, University of California, Merced, and the University of Warwick, Coventry.

Taking the temperature
For nearly a decade, this team has worked to develop a method that circumvents the usual challenges of measuring extreme temperatures -- specifically, the brief duration of the conditions that create those temperatures in the lab and the difficulty of calibrating how these complex systems affect other materials.

"Finally, we've directly and unambiguously taken a direct measurement, demonstrating a method that can be applied throughout the field," White said.

At SLAC's MEC instrument, the team used a laser to superheat a sample of gold. As heat flashed through the nanometer-thin sample, its atoms began to vibrate at a speed directly related to their rising temperature. The team then sent a pulse of ultrabright X-rays from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) through the superheated sample. As they scattered off the vibrating atoms, the X-rays' frequency shifted slightly, revealing the atoms' speed and thus their temperature.

"The novel temperature measurement technique developed in this study demonstrates that LCLS is at the frontier of laser-heated matter research," said Siegfried Glenzer, director of the High Energy Density Science division at SLAC and co-author on the paper. "LCLS, paired with these innovative techniques, plays an important role in advancing high-energy-density science and transformative applications like inertial fusion."

The team was thrilled to have successfully demonstrated this technique -- and as they took a deeper look at the data, they discovered something even more exciting.

"We were surprised to find a much higher temperature in these superheated solids than we initially expected, which disproves a long-standing theory from the 1980s," White said. "This wasn't our original goal, but that's what science is about -- discovering new things you didn't know existed."

Surviving the entropy catastrophe
Every material has specific melting and boiling points, marking the transition from solid to liquid and liquid to gas, respectively. However, there are exceptions. For instance, when water is heated rapidly in very smooth containers -- such as a glass of water in a microwave -- it can become "superheated," reaching temperatures above 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 degrees Celsius) without actually boiling. This occurs because there are no rough surfaces or impurities to trigger bubble formation.

This trick of nature, however, comes with an increased risk: The further a system strays from its normal melting and boiling points, the more vulnerable it is to what scientists call a catastrophe -- a sudden onset of melting or boiling triggered by a slight environmental change. For example, water that has been superheated in a microwave will boil explosively when disturbed, potentially causing serious burns.

While some experiments have shown it is possible to bypass these intermediary limits by rapidly heating materials, "the entropy catastrophe was still viewed as the ultimate boundary," White explained.

In their recent study, the team discovered that the gold had been superheated to an astonishing 19,000 kelvins (33,740 degrees F) -- more than 14 times its melting point and well beyond the proposed entropy catastrophe limit -- all while maintaining its solid crystalline structure.

Published August 2025

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