Are you ready to feel old? Lemmings just turned thirty-five. The famous puzzle game first came out in February of 1991 for the Commodore Amiga, before eventually being ported to just about everything else out there, from the ZX Spectrum to the FM Towns, and other systems so obscure they don’t have the class to start with two letters, like Macintosh and DOS. [RobSmithDev] decided he needed to commemorate the anniversary with a real floating lemming.
The umbrella-equipped lemming is certainly an iconic aspect of the game franchise, so it’s a good pick for a diorama. Some people would have just bought a figurine and hung it with some string, but that’s not going to get your project on Hackaday. [Rob] designed and 3D printed the whole tableau himself, and designed magnetic levitation system with some lemmings-themed effects.
The mag-lev is of the top-down type, where a magnet in the top of the umbrella is pulled against gravity by an electromagnetic coil. There are kits for this sort of thing, but they didn’t quite work for [Rob] so he rolled his own with an Arduino Nano. That allowed him to include luxuries you don’t always get from AliExpress like a thermal sensors.
Our favorite part of the build, though, has to be the sound effects. When the hall effect sensor detects the lemming statue — or, rather, the magnet in its umbrella — it plays the iconic “Let’s Go!” followed by the game’s sound track. If the figurine falls, or when you remove it, you get the “splat” sound, and if the lemming hits the magnet, it screams. [Rob] posted a demo video if you just want to see it in action, but there’s also a full build video that we’ve embedded below.
A commemorative mag-lev seems to be a theme for [Rob] — we featured his 40th anniversary Amiga lamp last year, but that’s hardly all he gets up to. We have also seen functional replicas, this one of a motion tracker from Aliens, and retrotech deep-dives like when he analyzed the magical-seeming tri-format floppy disk.
