Machinery
I Fixed a Tractor Using John Deere's Self-Repair Service. Farmers Aren't Sold on It
The agricultural machine manufacturer has a subscription service that lets owners repair their own equipment. Why is barely anybody using it? There is something wrong with the tractor. The water-in-fuel sensor, a small device embedded in the John Deere machine that monitors the integrity of its diesel engine, is disconnected. And I've got to fix it.
This AI-powered 3D printer is heavily discounted on Amazon -- save 170 on the Creality K1 Max 3D Printer
Creator Playbook Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Mashable Voices Look Up Trending Now Say More Mashable Selects Safety Net Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off In My Bag All Series The printer of the future has been marked down. Matt Ford is a freelance contributor to Mashable. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Mashable may earn an affiliate commission. Deal pricing and availability subject to change after time of publication.
The best deals on 3D printers this week -- shop Bambu Lab, Creality, and Flashforge with steep discounts
Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable Voices Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Your next hobby just got a lot more affordable. Soumya is a deals writer who covers consumer tech, shopping deals, and the products people use every day. With experience writing about everything from AI tools and software to smartphones and home gadgets, she enjoys breaking down product research into clear, useful recommendations. When she's not tracking deals, she's usually comparing products, digging through reviews, and figuring out what actually makes a purchase worth it. All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers.
SoftBank invests 200 million in construction startup Gravis Robotics
SoftBank Group's $200 million investment in Swiss startup Gravis Robotics marks another major robotics bet as founder Masayoshi Son seeks to make the company a pivotal player in the global AI race. SoftBank Group has invested $200 million in Gravis Robotics, a Swiss startup that makes autonomous software for construction machinery. Zurich-based Gravis announced the Series A investment in a statement on Monday but didn't share a valuation. It was reported in July that SoftBank was considering an acquisition of Gravis that might be completed in several stages, which includes injecting fresh capital over time. The deal marks another splashy investment into robotics from SoftBank, whose founder, Masayoshi Son, is trying to make his firm a pivotal player in the global artificial intelligence race. The Japanese investor, which by October is set to own a 13% stake in OpenAI, has backed a range of robotics businesses, including with the acquisition of ABB's industrial unit last year.
Slice-100K: A Multimodal Dataset for Extrusion-based 3D Printing
G-code (Geometric code) or RS-274 is the most widely used computer numerical control (CNC) and 3D printing programming language. G-code provides machine instructions for the movement of the 3D printer, especially for the nozzle, stage, and extrusion of material for extrusion-based additive manufacturing. Currently, there does not exist a large repository of curated CAD models along with their corresponding G-code files for additive manufacturing. To address this issue, we present Slice-100K, a first-of-its-kind dataset of over 100,000 G-code files, along with their tessellated CAD model, LVIS (Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation) categories, geometric properties, and renderings. We build our dataset from triangulated meshes derived from Objaverse-XL and Thingi10K datasets. We demonstrate the utility of this dataset by finetuning GPT-2 on a subset of the dataset for G-code translation from a legacy G-code format (Sailfish) to a more modern, widely used format (Marlin). Our dataset can be found here. Slice-100K will be the first step in developing a multimodal foundation model for digital manufacturing.
How Invisalign Became the World's Biggest User of 3D Printers
Joe Hogan, Align Technology's plastics-nerd CEO, says you shouldn't eat with your aligners and that you don't need to wear your retainers every night. Joe Hogan sees a lot of smiles. When people ask him where he works, he responds with "Align Technology," which inevitably prompts the follow up, "What's that?" After months, sometimes years, the discrete rival to braces promises to give people smiles they will want to show off. Hogan gets a look at them all. And he's eager to see more. Align is embarking on its biggest manufacturing overhaul since it was founded by two Stanford Graduate School of Business classmates 29 years ago. The company is preparing to begin directly 3D printing the aligners at the core of its business, ditching what Hogan describes as a longer, more wasteful process that involves making molds. A successful transition could lower costs and make treatment more affordable in the long run, bringing Invisalign to more customers and boosting Align's profits. It also, according to Hogan, would entrench Align as the world's biggest user of 3D printers .
VastTrack: Vast Category Visual Object Tracking
V astTrack consists of a few attractive properties: (1) V ast Object Category . In particular, it covers targets from 2,115 categories, significantly surpassing object classes of existing popular benchmarks ( e.g ., GOT -10k with 563 classes and LaSOT with 70 categories). Through providing such vast object classes, we expect to learn more general object tracking.
Man solves ceiling fans' most annoying problem
Technology Engineering Man solves ceiling fans' most annoying problem His 3D-printed device finally shows a ceiling fans' speed. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Anyone who's used an overhead ceiling fan knows it can be a pain to work. Yanking its chain gets the motor running, but there's no easy visual indication of what speed setting the fan is on. The blades can also take a frustratingly long time to reach their full speed.
Father and son reclaim Guinness World Record for fastest quadcopter drone
Luke and Mike Bell's Peregrine 4 achieved the milestone barely a month after it was taken from them. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A YouTuber and his father have once again reclaimed the Guinness World Record for fastest quadcopter drone . Soaring through the air at an average speed of 408 miles per hour, Luke and Mike Bell's Peregrine 4 highlights the latest intersection between engineering, creativity, and 3D-printing technology. The Bells' achievement arrives barely a month after Australian aerospace engineer Ben Biggs and his Blackbird drone set the now-previous world record at 389 mph.