Arduino Levitation

Here’s the proof that Arduino is a tool for serious prototyping and not just a toy. [Norbert Požár] built a magnetic levitation device that combines an Arduino with an electromagnetic driver circuit and a magnetic field sensing circuit. Unlike other other levitation setups that use optical sensing, this implementation uses a hall effect sensor on the electromagnet to maintain the distance between it, and the permanent magnet it is holding in midair. Check out the embedded video after the break and browse through the overview page so see how pleasing it is to do away with a frame around the floating object. This makes us wonder if it could be inverted in a way similar to that magnetic scale.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QunBD_fD04k&w=470]

[via Dangerous Prototypes]

11 thoughts on “Arduino Levitation

  1. ok i have a question…
    just how far can you make the gap on these levetron things :)

    sigh wish i had the room for a goof off bench to setup things i’m not fixing :p

    i’m wating for some one to take the plunge and make a large LCD tv stand out of one of these things.

    it would need a backup power supply and a safe fail but would look sweet just floating there.

    if you could live with the risk of it crashing to the floor.

  2. Oh gawd, how old is this.

    Pretty cool though.

    “just how far can you make the gap on these levetron things”
    Depends how big your electromagnet is :p

    You could probably levitate a car with one of those scrap metal electromagnets and some beefy control. Now that I want to see…

  3. nevermind the TV. I want it on a chair (something like this).

    chair is on floor you sit in and then levitate. add height control and some rotational control you have the uber-geek chair.

  4. just how far can you make the gap on these levetron things :)

    Magnetism drops in power as a cube (I think?) as the distance drops by a power of two (or linearly)?

    Too lazy to look it up but the further away you get, the size of the magnetic field you need goes up by a whole lot. Same theory applies to things like explosions and sound waves or any electromagnetic wave for that matter (unless it is coherent like a laser or bounces off of things like clouds like AM radio, etc)

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