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Changelog

Features, improvements, and fixes shipped to Materials Prep. We post updates here when they reach the bench, not when the commit lands.

Add your lab's own etchants alongside the PACE catalog

The ~2,700-entry PACE catalog now sits next to a custom catalog your lab owns. Add the etchants and variants your bench actually mixes, cite them into recipe steps, and retire the ones you've stopped using — all scoped to your lab.

New

  • Custom etchants, scoped to your lab. Admins and technicians can add an etchant with full composition, target alloys, exposure method, and safety notes, plus a lab-private notes field that never leaves your lab. Each entry is audited on create and edit, with a before/after diff in the audit log.
  • A three-way filter on the etchant browser — All / Catalog / Custom — so you can look at just the curated PACE catalog, just your lab's own entries, or both at once. Lab entries carry a colored chip with your lab's name so the source is always obvious.
  • Retire (and restore) custom etchants. The danger-zone Retire is a two-step confirm and a soft delete, so etch steps that already cite the etchant keep their reference and nothing is lost.

Improved

  • The curated PACE catalog is untouched. Custom and curated etchants live in separate tables and merge only at read time, so your additions can never collide with or overwrite a catalog entry.

Send feedback from anywhere in the app

A Send-feedback button now lives in the header next to Mai and Search, on every page. Report a bug, request a feature, or leave a note without leaving what you were doing.

New

  • Send-feedback button in the app header, available on every authenticated route. Pick a kind (bug, feature request, or other), write your note, and it goes straight to the founders.
  • A context strip shows you exactly what's attached before anything sends — the page you're on, viewport, and browser. No surprise telemetry; you see what we see.

Filter the samples list by active, completed, or all

A Show: Active / Completed / All switch on the samples list, plus batch rows that expand inline to show the samples inside them.

New

  • Show: Active / Completed / All filter on the samples list. Active is the default and keys off whether a sample is actually completed, not just its prep status — so a polished sample that's already been signed off as done no longer lingers in the active view.

Improved

  • Batch rows expand inline to show their member samples, each with its own done badge, so you can read a batch's progress without opening every sample.

Reports now download as Word too, not just PDF

Every report (standard sample, standard batch, certificate of conformance) now generates in two formats at once: the locked PDF for delivery, and an editable Word .docx for any last-minute tweaks. Drop in your customer's logo, edit the cover paragraph, add a signed-off conclusion. Same data, two files, no separate step.

New

  • Word (.docx) download on every report, alongside the existing PDF. Click Generate report and both files are saved to your lab's reports; both are signed for download from the report detail page. PDF is the immutable customer-facing delivery; Word is the editable starting point cert houses, FA labs, and QA shops already use for customer-specific tweaks before sending.
  • Same coverage as PDF: standard sample report (cover, summary, full prep journal, hardness card, performed-by stamps), standard batch report (one document covering every sample in the batch), and certificate of conformance (one-pager with spec band, aggregate hardness, conforms / out of spec call, signature block).
  • Both formats render from the same underlying data, so they can't drift. Generate once, ship the PDF as-is, or open the Word version and customize it in 5 minutes instead of rebuilding the template from scratch.

Grade vs Alloy vs Type, dozens of new materials, and reactive-metal hazard notes

Per-material designation labels so cast iron, stainless, and titanium read right at the bench. The catalog also gained ductile-iron grades, refractory metals, ceramics, PM, rare-earth metals, and a hazard note on materials that ignite from grinding friction.

New

  • Per-material designation label. The 'Alloy' picker on the sample and recipe forms now reads 'Grade' for cast iron, refractory metals, ceramics, PM, and composites; 'Type' for stainless and tool steels; 'Alloy / Grade' for carbon steel; and 'Alloy' for everything else. The label flows through to column headers, atlas search, and Mai's prompt so Ductile 65-45-12 shows up as a grade, not an alloy, and Type 304 shows up as a type.
  • Several dozen new catalog entries fill in families that were thin. Highlights: cast iron gets all five ASTM A536 ductile grades plus malleable, ADI, Ni-Resist, SiMo, and CGI 450; titanium gets CP Grades 3 and 4 plus Ti-6242, Ti-5-2.5, and Ti-15-3 (β); refractories (tungsten, molybdenum, tantalum) gain pure and alloyed designations; WC-Co cermets carry ISO P/M/K and US C-grade classifications; alumina, zirconia, SiC, and AlN ceramics carry purity and processing grades; PM sintered iron gets MPIF FC/FN/F designations; stainless rounds out with 321, 347, 440C, 17-7 PH, 254 SMO, AL-6XN, 2507, and 2304; tool steels gain O1, W1, S7, P20; magnesium gets AZ31B / AZ91D / AM60B / ZK60 / WE43; borosilicate glasses gain Pyrex / Borofloat / Duran / Vycor; thermal-spray coatings gain WC-CoCr HVOF, YSZ TBC, NiCrAlY, and Zn anti-corrosion; polymer composites get CFRP / GFRP / AFRP; metal-matrix composites get SiC/Al, Al2O3/Al, B4C/Al.
  • Mischmetal, Ferrocerium, Cerium, Lanthanum, Neodymium, and Praseodymium as base materials. Each carries a hazard note rendered next to the picker entry: these are pyrophoric as fines and ignite from grinding friction, so the note flags the safety procedure (kerosene or mineral oil sectioning, Class D extinguisher at the bench, never water-based coolant) before a tech starts work. The note is also fed to Mai so a hazard-aware recommendation is the default.
  • Add a custom material under Settings, Materials catalog, Add material. Pick a category and prep class, set the designation label, and the entry shows up in your org's picker alongside the built-in catalog.

Heat number, condition, supplier, customer PO on every sample, plus CSV bulk import

Five new fields on the sample form cover the metadata cert houses and failure-analysis labs actually write on the bag at intake. And a new CSV importer covers the case the existing forms didn't: many distinct samples in one intake event.

New

  • Heat / lot number on each sample. Previously available only on batches (the heat is usually shared across a melt), now also available per-sample for the cases a batch can't cover: failure analysis on one bolt, one-off characterization, mixed-heat intake. Samples filed under a heat-pinned batch are backfilled with that batch's heat number automatically.
  • Material condition / temper. Free text by design (as-received, annealed, cold-drawn, hardened to 45-48 HRC, solution-treated + aged). Recipe selection varies sharply by condition for the same material, so this is the field Mai needs most to give correct guidance on 1018 cold-drawn vs hot-rolled, 6061-T6 vs 6061-O, Ti-6Al-4V annealed vs STA.
  • Supplier / vendor. Where the plate came from. Soft text with per-lab autocomplete against historical values.
  • Customer PO and customer part number. The cert house's outbound anchors that tie the sample to the certificate it'll eventually ship with.
  • CSV import at Samples, Import. Paste or upload a comma- or tab-separated file with one row per sample. Covers the case the existing two intake paths (single-sample form, batch form) didn't: many DISTINCT samples in one intake, e.g. a cert house receiving 40 plates from 12 different heats with their own POs. Preview flags unknown materials and validation errors inline; up to 200 rows per submission.

Sample status follows every logged step, with a lab-level opt-out for teaching and QA

Until now only the first journal entry on a sample advanced its status (received to in-prep). Logging an etch, polish, image, or report now advances forward across the whole pipeline, with safeguards for the cases where it shouldn't.

New

  • Sample status automation toggle under Settings, Status automation. Defaults on. Turn it off for teaching labs running classroom prep exercises or QA shops that anchor sample.status to a manual sign-off rather than a step log.

Improved

  • Status auto-advance now follows the step type. An etch entry takes a sample to 'etched', a polish to 'polished', an image to 'imaged', and so on. Auxiliary steps like cleaning don't advance, and non-progressing entry states (not-started, aborted, redo) don't either. The pipeline is one-way: a stray 'etch' log on an already-'imaged' sample never downgrades it.

Ask the help center anything, and a quieter M.AI button on every page

A dedicated Mai on the help center that knows the app inside and out, free for every signed-in user regardless of plan or add-on. Plus the prep-Mai launcher moves to a single calm slot in the header on every page.

New

  • Ask M.AI from the help center. Different from prep-Mai: she's loaded with a product reference covering every route, feature, setting, and plan gate, and her job is to explain Materials Prep itself, not run prep. Free for every signed-in user, no Metallogic AI add-on required; a lighter per-user hourly cap keeps costs bounded.

Improved

  • Prep-Mai launcher consolidated into the app header. One button next to the avatar replaces the per-page chips that used to live on lab home, samples, batches, projects, studies, recipes, and etchants. The button knows the page you're on, so opening it from a sample loads sample context, opening it from etchants loads your filter snapshot, and so on.
  • Refreshed M.AI logo and a calmer button at rest. Soft border, no glow until you hover. The verb 'Ask' moved to the tooltip rather than the chrome, so the persistent slot reads as ambient rather than promotional.
  • Avatar menu refresh. Your avatar, name, email, and role (Owner, Lab admin, Member, PACE admin) sit together at the top of the dropdown so it's obvious which lab you're currently in and what you can do there.

Classroom support — student role and roster invites

First-pass support for university teaching labs. Students can keep their own work tidy without stepping on the curriculum, and instructors can invite a whole class in one paste.

New

  • New Student role under Settings → Members. Students can create samples and edit only their own; the lab's curriculum atlas, recipes, equipment, and settings stay read-only. Designed for classes where dozens of students share one lab and you don't want anyone rewriting the instructor's reference material.
  • Invite a roster: paste a list of emails — one per line, or comma-separated — and pick one role for everyone. Each invitee gets the standard invitation email and link. Up to 200 addresses per submission.
  • After the roster is sent, a summary card shows how many invitations went out, how many were skipped (already a member, or recently invited), and how many failed, with a row per address so you can spot the duplicates.

Score your study samples, see every recipe revision, and let Mai draft writeups

Studies finally produce something more than a paragraph at the end: a 1–5 rubric across seven prep-quality dimensions ranks samples at a glance. Recipes you've marked Approved keep a visible history of every change. And Mai can draft your hypothesis, conclusion, or case findings.

New

  • Per-sample scoring on the study comparison: rate each sample 1–5 on relief, pull-out, edge retention, etch quality, scratch density, prep time, and consumable cost (5 is always good, even on dimensions where lower is normally better). The comparison grows a Scores section with a chip per sample per dimension and a green ring on the winner of each row.
  • Version timeline at the top of every recipe page. Click to expand the list of versions, each with its change note, author, and date. Every entry has a Diff link that opens a side-by-side step-by-step comparison so you can see exactly what changed between revisions.
  • Editing an Approved recipe now asks for a short note describing what changed. The note is required, capped at 500 characters, and shows up in the version timeline. Drafts and Under-validation recipes still edit in place quietly so you can iterate without ceremony.
  • Mai-drafted Hypothesis and Conclusion on the study edit page, and Mai-drafted Findings on the project edit page. One click pulls in the relevant samples and observations and produces a paragraph for you to review and save. Counts as one conversation against your monthly Metallogic AI budget. The button is hidden when your organization doesn't have Metallogic AI on its plan.
  • Findings field on every project — a place to write up a case, a closeout summary, or any conclusion that belongs to the project as a whole rather than a single sample.

Spec bands, the certificate of conformance, and automatic scale bars

QA shops get the artifacts they actually hand to customers. Set spec limits on a project and out-of-spec hardness readings flag themselves. Generate a one-page certificate of conformance with a clear Conforms / Out of spec call. Every micrograph in your PDFs now carries a scale bar.

New

  • Spec bands on every project, reachable from a Spec bands button in the project header. Set a target, lower and upper limits, and optional inner action limits for any of six hardness scales (HRC, HRB, HV, HK, HBW, HSD). Add as many dimensions as your project measures.
  • Out-of-spec warnings on hardness entries. When the project has a spec band that matches the hardness scale you used, the entry shows a chip — All in spec, N approaching limit, or N out of spec — and the individual readings color-code green, amber, or red so drift catches the lab before it catches the customer.
  • Certificate of conformance: a new one-page PDF on the Generate batch report screen, alongside the existing standard report. Cover with customer, heat or lot, and alloy; spec range and target; aggregate hardness with a Conforms / Approaching limit / Out of spec badge; optional reference micrograph; signature block for the lab to sign and stamp.
  • Automatic scale bar burned into the cert's reference micrograph when the source image is calibrated. The lightbox in the app already drew one — PDFs match it now.

Improved

  • The Generate batch report screen now opens with two side-by-side cards (Standard report / Certificate of conformance) so the choice is obvious. Standard stays the default.

Heat numbers, retain flags, case-style projects, prep-artifact tags, project reports, and a Mine filter

A bundle of small additions that together pay back across QA shops, failure-analysis labs, R&D teams, and any growing lab.

New

  • Heat or lot number on batches as its own searchable field. Use whatever scheme your shop already uses ("2624-C", "H-2025-014", "lot 26-1142"). It shows up as its own column on the batches list and as a chip on the batch page.
  • Retain flag on batches for AS9100, NADCAP, or any audit-pull workflow. Set an optional Archive-until date and an amber Retain badge appears on the batch and on the list. The batches list grows a Retain row with All retains and Expiring this year filters.
  • Project kind: pick Case, Program, Study only, or Other when you create or edit a project. Setting it to Case relabels Customer PO as Case ID and adds a small Case chip on the list — natural language for failure-analysis casework instead of forcing a manufacturing program shape on it.
  • Prep-artifact tags on polish and final-polish steps: relief, pull-out, comet tails, smearing, edge rounding, and the rest of the standard artifact list, grouped by stage so the right options are nearby. Tag what you saw at the bench instead of writing it into free-text observations.
  • Reports section on the project page that gathers every sample report and batch report filed under that project, newest first. Doesn't show up until the project actually has reports, so projects in flight stay clean.
  • A Mine pill on the samples list, right next to All. One click shows just the samples you've added — handy on a multi-person lab and especially on a busy classroom day. The URL is shareable, so it works as a bookmark too.

Batches are expandable everywhere they appear

The dropdown-style batch row from the project detail page now also drives the lab home and the samples list. Click a batch to reveal its samples inline without leaving the page you're on.

Improved

  • Lab home: batches in the Stuck, Awaiting prep, In active prep, and Awaiting review buckets expand inline to show their queued siblings, with an Open batch link in the panel for the full detail page.
  • Samples list: same-batch samples present in the visible page collapse into a single expandable row, so a 12-puck batch reads as one row instead of twelve. Standalone samples render as before.
  • Samples list rendering is now a single list at every breakpoint (the desktop 7-column table is gone), matching the project page so batch rows can nest cleanly inside.

Domain-discovery onboarding: policy controls, request approval, no more duplicate orgs

Signing up with an email at a verified-domain customer now routes you into that org instead of creating a duplicate. Org admins choose between auto-join, request-approval, or off, and can see pending requests alongside pending invites.

New

  • Org-admin Join policy under Plan → SSO domain binding: choose between Request approval (default for new orgs), Auto-join silently, or Off. Pick the role new joiners get (viewer or technician) and which lab they land in.
  • Pending join requests panel on Settings → Members for org admins, with one-click approve and a deny flow that takes an optional note shown to the requester.
  • Onboarding now routes signed-in users through pending invitations and verified-domain matches before offering the create-new-org form, so a teammate at an existing customer ends up in the right place by default.
  • Admin notifications by email when someone auto-joins, when a join request is filed, and when a request is approved or denied.

Fixed

  • Email/password signups at customers with a verified email domain were silently creating duplicate organizations instead of joining the existing one. The auth callback now treats email confirmation and OAuth as equivalent proof of mailbox control.
  • The free-email-provider denylist is now applied at sign-in time as well as at domain-claim time, so a stale public-domain claim can no longer absorb every signup.

Metallogic AI (Mai), the prep assistant, ships

Mai, an AI prep assistant grounded in the PACE Metallographic Handbook, your lab's recipe library, and the 2,700-entry etchant catalog, is now available as a $49/month add-on on every plan including Free.

New

  • Metallogic AI (Mai): an AI prep assistant for metallography labs, available as a $49/month per-organization add-on. Add it from Settings → Plan, or from the upsell card on any sample.
  • Sample-page drawer: open Mai from any sample and the conversation starts with that sample's material, hardness, mount, goal, recent journal entries, the lab's owned consumables, and matching recipes already loaded. No re-typing context.
  • Lab-home and etchants drawers so Mai is reachable for general questions and catalog lookups outside a specific sample.
  • Recipe recommendations: Mai drafts a complete prep ladder (section, mount, grind, polish, etch) and saves it straight to the recipe library, optionally linked to the active sample.
  • Photo-attached defect diagnosis: attach an edge photo and Mai names the failure mode (rounding, comet tails, pull-out, smearing) and proposes a corrected ladder.
  • Etchant lookups across the PACE catalog of about 2,700 entries, returning composition, procedure, and what the etch reveals.
  • Self-serve Stripe Checkout for the add-on from the Plan page, including monthly conversation budgets and Customer Portal management.
  • Public marketing page at /m-ai with product overview, pricing, and the AI privacy disclosure.
  • Trust-page AI section and Privacy-policy AI clause spelling out exactly what is sent to Anthropic, what is not, and the no-model-training commitment.
  • Org-admin Metallogic activity view for monitoring usage and conversations across the organization.

Stripe billing, recipe library, atlas prep snapshots, and a bigger materials catalog

Self-serve Stripe checkout goes live, atlas entries now carry the recipe behind each micrograph, recipes can be shared and adopted across labs, and the built-in materials catalog roughly doubles.

New

  • Self-serve Stripe Checkout from the pricing page for the Lab and Multi-Lab tiers, plus a Customer Portal for managing payment method, invoices, and plan changes.
  • Atlas prep snapshots: every atlas entry carries the recipe (steps, etchant, equipment) that produced the micrograph, with an edit-request workflow when something needs correcting.
  • Recipe library under Recipes → Library: browse, adopt, and endorse recipes shared from other labs in your org or globally.
  • Per-indent hardness measurements with value, position, and region — replacing the flat numeric array.
  • Observation step type on prep journals for in-process notes that aren't grind, polish, mount, or etch.
  • Region and specimen tags on prep journal entries so each log travels with the right material region of a multi-material sample.
  • Brazed/soldered joint and clad-plate specimen templates.
  • PVD/CVD coatings (TiN, AlTiN, AlCrN, CrN, ZrN, DLC, ta-C, CVD diamond, multilayer stacks) and Electroplate (hard chrome, electroless Ni, sulfamate Ni, acid Cu, Au, Zn, Cd, Sn) under the coating category.
  • Materials catalog expansion: composites and CMCs, AHSS and maraging, semiconductors (Si, SiC, III-V wafers), Zr, Be, BeO, soft magnetic alloys, AM aluminum, brazing fillers, weld consumables, NbTi, rail and spring grades — about 56 materials and 480 alloys built in.
  • Custom materials accepted in the CMC and semiconductor categories, alongside the existing free-text fallback.
  • Confirmation dialog for member role changes and removals, showing the user's other lab memberships in the org so admins see the blast radius before acting.

Improved

  • SSO and domain binding now included on every paid tier (Lab and up), not Multi-Lab and above.
  • Lab section pages stream with content-shaped skeletons, and top + bottom nav links bold and pulse the moment they're clicked, so route transitions don't feel blank.
  • Atlas grid streams its signed image URLs separately from the header and filters so the page is interactive sooner.

Pricing tiers, audit log, SSO, and a trust page

Plan tiers and a 14-day trial land. Organization admins get a real audit log and OAuth domain binding. A new trust page lays out how your data is stored and protected.

New

  • Pricing page and plan tiers (Free, Lab, Multi-Lab, Unlimited) with a one-click 14-day Multi-Lab trial.
  • OAuth sign-in via Google and Microsoft, alongside email + password and magic-link.
  • Domain-bound SSO (Multi-Lab and above): claim an email domain and OAuth sign-ins from that domain auto-join your organization.
  • Audit log viewer at Organization → Audit log, with filters and CSV export. Append-only, encrypted at rest, accessible to org admins.
  • Lab data export under Settings → Export.
  • Suggested recipes card on the sample detail page, ranked by past use on similar samples.
  • Etchant edit UI for Pace org admins to maintain the catalog.
  • Organization profile, admins, and members management pages.
  • Trust page covering data isolation, access control, encryption, image storage, audit logging, subprocessors, backups, data export, and our compliance posture.
  • Trust link added to the marketing footer alongside Privacy and Terms.

Improved

  • Etchants catalog: full reagent list now loads (the 600-row cap is gone), filtering and search are instant, and admin edits propagate immediately.
  • Etchant catalog content: editorial passes on application notes, Pace-list audit, ASTM/Adler/Beaudry-Myklebust naming corrections.

Onboarding, help center, and prep workflow polish

New labs get a guided start, sign-in gets simpler, and grinding and polishing entries get faster to log.

New

  • Onboarding checklist that walks a new lab through its first sample, recipe, and etchant.
  • Help center with quick-reference guides.
  • Magic-link sign-in as an alternative to password.
  • Image scale recorded on micrographs so dimensions travel with the photo.
  • Structured step parameters per step type, replacing free-text fields.
  • Recipe feedback so technicians can flag what worked and what didn't.
  • Safety notes on etchants, surfaced where the technician picks them.

Improved

  • Searchable abrasives in grinding and polishing entries.
  • Clone-last-step option to repeat a previous prep entry quickly.
  • Inline Clone-step modal on the sample detail page for grind and polish entries.
  • Abrasive ordering follows your locale: FEPA grit primary outside the US.
  • Free-text combobox replaced with a click-open dropdown plus an Other (specify) option.

Fixed

  • Atlas-add no longer silently fails on journal entries.
  • Atlas detail page renders cleanly after an unexpected error.

Multi-material samples and member management

Samples can capture more than one material region, lab admins can shape sample IDs to match their existing scheme, and member management lands.

New

  • Multi-material sample regions with specimen templates.
  • Customizable sample ID format for lab admins.
  • Members management page for adding, removing, and changing roles inside a lab.
  • Realtime updates so changes from other lab members appear without a manual refresh.
  • Sample creator shown on the samples list.
  • Filter samples by the user who added them.

Improved

  • Added-by filter pills and table column polished.

Atlas, etchants, studies, recipes, and reports

The full prep surface comes online. Every feature on the homepage now exists in the app, plus admin tooling for organizations.

New

  • Atlas of micrographs, searchable by alloy, condition, and etchant.
  • Etchant catalog with composition, target alloys, and use tags.
  • Studies that group samples for failure analysis, qualification, and R&D.
  • Recipes with draft, under-validation, and approved states.
  • Report PDFs.
  • Materials archive.
  • Organization admins can delete labs, with safety guards.

Improved

  • Cmd+K search refreshes its index on every open.
  • Samples list paginated to 50 rows with an exact total count.
  • Etchant catalog cleaned up and expanded.

Initial release

Materials Prep ships as a working metallography ELN: samples, prep journals, and lab-scoped roles.

New

  • Per-sample prep journals covering mounting, grinding, polishing, and etching.
  • Lab and organization scoping with admin, technician, and viewer roles.
  • Image storage tied to each sample's prep entries.