Yaw-Roll-Roll-Yaw-Roll-Yaw into the Holidays

This week: 2025 holiday gift guide, Polaris & LG factory tours, 3D Printed EOAT, Toyota GR GT chassis teardown, injection moulding molds, nuclear cold criticality, bio-oil carbon removal, Mujin raise

Dec 07, 2025

∙ Paid

Shop Talk

Capturing this week’s zeitgeist

This year’s inaugural holiday gift guide provides a curated selection of open-source robotics, consumer-grade additive manufacturing, and toys to get the children engaged in industrial technology.

SO ARM 100 - A low-cost, 3D-printable 6-DOF robotic arm designed for AI research and data collection. Why they’ll love it: It is the current standard for accessible robot manipulation, designed to work seamlessly with the LeRobot library. It’s the perfect project for engineers wanting to build their own industrial-style manipulator at home.

Thor - A robust, open-source, 3D-printable robotic arm with a 750g payload capacity. Why they’ll love it: Thor mimics the configuration of commercial industrial robots. It’s a slightly larger, more heavy-duty build than the SO ARM 100, ideal for testing more complex kinematics.

Bambu Lab P2S - The late-2025 successor to the P1S, featuring advanced AI failure detection, a touchscreen interface, and an active airflow system. Why they’ll love it: You need a reliable machine to print the gears and chassis for the Thor or SO ARM 100. While the A1 is good, the P2S handles engineering materials (ABS/ASA) far better, making it the superior choice for printing structural robot parts. Pro tip: Pair with SAM3.

For the Children

Build Box - Designed for kids ages 8-years and older, each kit contains all the stuff you need to make the toy is included in the Build Box, even batteries.

Stickerbox - An AI-powered thermal printer that instantly turns spoken prompts into stickers. Why they’ll love it: It’s “generative manufacturing” in a toy box.

Robotics for Babies & ABCs of Engineering - Unleash your toddler’s natural curiosity with a board book that gently introduces foundational robotics and engineering ideas!

Get ready for 2026! We are rolling out exclusive new content for paid subscribers only. Join the inner circle now and secure your spot with this special offer👇

Get 50% off for 1 year

Assembly Line

This week’s Industry 5.0 breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.

🏭 Tours of the Polaris R&D facility on the Slingshot’s 10th anniversary

Polaris sets itself apart in the recreational vehicle industry by utilizing automotive-grade R&D technology typically reserved for major car manufacturers. The facility features extreme “torture” rigs designed to compress years of wear into a few days; these include shaker beds that mimic rough terrain and robotic arms capable of rapid-fire manipulation, such as pulling a brake lever 20 times a second. This physical stress testing is supported by a specialized metallurgy lab that functions as a forensic unit, allowing engineers to analyze failed parts and definitively distinguish between manufacturing defects and user error.

Beyond durability, the facility houses advanced non-destructive testing environments, including a room-sized high-resolution X-ray machine and a vault-like Electromagnetic (EMR) lab. The EMR lab uses an array of broad-spectrum antennae to test for electronic interference, ensuring that a vehicle’s starter motor won’t disrupt a rider’s smartphone and that external signals won’t hamper the vehicle’s performance.

🖨️ How 3D Printed EOAT Transforms Automation

Large 3D Printed Thermoforming Tool For A Drone Cover /Catalysis Additive Tooling/
Artificial tendons give muscle-powered robots a boost /MIT News/ by 11X in power-to-weight ratio of muscle–tendon units.

🏎️ Teardown: The New Toyota GR GT Chassis

Toyota’s GR GT supercar uses a highly cost-optimized aluminum space-frame with large A356 cast nodes, extrusions, and selective CFRP panels — a Corvette C7/C8-inspired layout executed with Toyota’s low-volume pragmatism and first-ever aluminum body-in-white. Key technologies include:

Cast aluminum nodes + extrusions: Corvette-level rigidity and double-wishbone packaging without expensive gigacasting tooling
Targeted CFRP (hood, inner doors, complex nodes): major weight savings and NVH improvement at minimal tooling cost
Compact hybrid transaxle (integrated e-motor + 8-speed auto): enables short wheelbase, possible EV mode, but kills rear trunk space

🔋 Competing to Build the Fastest-Growing Energy Startup Ever with Base Power’s Zach Dell & Justin Lopas

♨️ Eavor Technologies Wants to Use New Technology to Heat an Old German Town /WSJ/

Improvement of technological and design preparation for the production of mould tools for plastic injection moulding

This study integrates IDEF0 and FMEA methodologies to optimize the design and preparation of dispenser injection moulds using the Creo Tool Design Extension. The proposed model identifies potential failures and structural constraints, helping to minimize common errors like geometric deviations. Results demonstrate that this approach improves inter-departmental coordination, shortens production times, and reduces critical process risks by 20%.

How Industrial Molds Conquered a Complex Impeller Fan Mold Challenge /MoldMaking Technology/
Stockwell Elastomerics Expands Micro Molding Capabilities with Sodick Injection Molding Machine /IMD/
A New Machine Design Parameter: Feedback /MachineDesign/ with parameters that correlate strongly with failure modes and performance optimization are generally the most useful.

Incautious Optimism

Little lost Box of Magic

Here comes the nuclear renaissance…

2 days ago · 12 likes · 1 comment · Incautious Optimism

New Product Introduction

Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services

☢️ Valar Atomics Says It’s the First Nuclear Startup to Achieve Criticality

Valar Atomics achieved its historic milestone by successfully reaching “cold criticality,” a state where a nuclear chain reaction is self-sustaining but generates zero power or heat. This test validated the company’s “Nova Core” design, a graphite-moderated, helium-cooled system powered by HALEU TRISO fuel. This advanced fuel encapsulates uranium in robust ceramic layers, rendering it melt-proof and allowing the reactor to operate safely at higher temperatures than conventional designs.

This rapid success was made possible through a strategic partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Rather than spending years constructing its own testing facility, Valar utilized LANL’s National Criticality Experiments Research Center (NCERC). By leveraging existing federal infrastructure and safety protocols, the startup was able to bypass typical construction delays and regulatory bottlenecks, moving quickly from digital blueprints to physical proof of their reactor’s physics.

⚗️ Learnings from the Field: Reducing MRV Costs by 97% Through Ops Consistency

Charm Industrial has successfully slashed the cost of Measurement, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) by 88%, a critical breakthrough for the economics of bio-oil carbon removal. By leveraging improved operational stability and data showing less than 1% variance between samples, the team optimized their protocol with verification partner Isometric, moving from high-frequency sampling to larger batches with streamlined testing. This shift allows them to maintain rigorous scientific standards while decoupling testing costs from production volume.

Financially, this drops MRV expenses from over $200 per ton to roughly $21.60, a major stride toward their goal of sub-$200/ton total sequestration costs. The roadmap ahead is even more aggressive: Charm is preparing to implement “Method B,” a monthly testing cadence that is projected to lower MRV costs to just $7.85 per ton. This potential 97% total reduction highlights how process maturity is quickly driving down unit economics, paving the way for gigaton-scale deployment.

⚗️ Tetra Technologies parlaying new Lafayette County bromine facility into possible magnesium production

Tetra Technologies and Magrathea Metals have formed a strategic joint venture to establish the United States’ only domestic magnesium production facility at Tetra’s “Evergreen Project” in Southwest Arkansas. By integrating Magrathea’s magnesium tech into its existing brine infrastructure, Tetra transforms what would be a single-resource well into a multi-revenue “mineral campus.” They can monetize the bromine (industrial chemicals), lithium (EV batteries), and magnesium (defense/lightweighting) all from the same fluid resource, significantly increasing the economic efficiency of their Arkansas facility.

Business Transactions

This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.

🇬🇧 The Offshore Wind Growth Partnership (OWGP) has allocated £2.4 million in development funding to nine UK supply chain companies /The Engineer/

🇯🇵🦾 Mujin Raises US$ 233 Million to Accelerate Global Growth and Drive the Future of Intelligent Automation

Mujin, a global leader in automation technology, announced the successful first close of its Series D funding round, raising a total of US$ 233 million through a combination of equity and debt financing. The investment will accelerate the global adoption of MujinOS, the company’s flagship intelligent robotics platform and further advance the development of real-time digital twin, motion planning and orchestration technologies for manufacturing and logistics. Mujin raised $133 million in equity from investors with NTT Group as the lead investor, followed by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) as the co-lead investor, Mitsubishi HC Capital Realty Co., Ltd. and Salesforce Ventures.

🇺🇸💿 Mixx Technologies Raises $33M Series-A to Redefine AI Infrastructure through Full-Stack Optical Integration

Mixx Technologies, the pioneer behind high-performance, system-scale optical connectivity for the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, announced the successful closure of a $33 million Series A funding round. The financing was led by ICM HPQC Fund, with participation from TDK Ventures, Systemiq Capital, Banpu Innovation & Ventures, G Vision Capital, Ajinomoto Group Ventures, AVITIC Innovation Fund, and other strategic partners. The capital will be used to advance Mixx’s product development milestones, expand its global footprint, and scale R&D centers in the U.S., India, and Taiwan, alongside continued investment in its strategic collaborations with ecosystem partners.

Mixx was founded by the innovators behind Intel’s silicon photonics-based transceivers and Broadcom’s industry-first co-packaged optics (CPO) for network switches. The team has been at the forefront of every major leap in connectivity and is now uniting to eliminate the interconnect bottleneck that constrains performance and scalability of artificial intelligence. With a platform that merges photonics, advanced packaging, and system architecture, Mixx is building the foundation for faster and more parallelized AI infrastructure.

🇨🇦⚗️ pH7 Technologies Raises $25.6 Million Series B to Scale Critical Metals Extraction Technology

pH7 Technologies, a pioneer in commercially scalable critical metal extraction solutions, announced the initial closing of USD $25.6 million as part of its Series B financing round. The round was led by Fine Structure Ventures, with BHP Ventures joining as a key strategic investor, alongside Energy & Environment Investment (EEI), Siteground, Gaingels Fund, and Calm Venture, with continued participation from existing investors including TDK Ventures, Pangaea Ventures, Rhapsody Venture Partners, and BASF Venture Capital.

Proceeds from the financing will advance the scaling and commercialization of pH7’s extraction technology for the mining sector, beginning with copper, as global demand for critical minerals continues to outpace supply. pH7’s extraction technology enables operators to economically recover metals from lower-grade ores, and other feedstocks that have historically been uneconomic to process - unlocking new domestic sources of copper, nickel, and PGMs. Proceeds from the round will support commercial deployments and on-site demonstrations at mining operations globally.