Levitating chairs from the Jetsons still have a few years of becoming a commercial product though they are fun to think about. One such curious inventor, [Conor Patrick], took a deep dive into the world of maglev and came up with a plan to create a clock with levitating hands. He shares the first part of his journey to horizontal levitational control.
[Conor Patrick] bought an off-the-shelf levitation product that was capable of horizontal levitation. Upon dissecting it he found a large magnet, four electromagnet coils, and a hall effect sensor. These parts collectively form a closed-loop control to hold an object at a specific distance. He soon discovered that in fact, there were just two coils energized by H-bridges. His first attempt at replicating the circuit, he employed a breadboard which worked fine for a single axis model. Unfortunately, it did not work as expected with multiple coils.
After a few iteration and experiments with the PID control loop, he was able to remove unwanted sensor feedback as well as overshoot in control current. He finally moved to a Teensy with a digital PD loop. The system works, but only marginally. [Conor Patrick] is seeking help from the control loop experts out there and that is the essence of the OSHW world. The best part of this project is that it is a journey that involves solving one problem at a time. We hope to see some unique results in the future.
We have covered Acoustic Levitation in the past and the Levitating Clock on a similar beat. We’re certain a more refined approach is on the horizon since many of us are now looking at making one to experiment with on our workbench.
while my back likes the idea of magnetically levitating my chair, what would be the power requirements for this ? I’m going out on a limb here and guess it’s not very feasible..
A bigger problem is probably that the sweet spot is small and finicky. If you plunk down in your chair, you will likely end up on the ground. Not good for your back.
Well, magnetic beds have already been done here:
http://hackaday.com/2012/05/23/build-a-levitating-bed-for-under-1000/
Maybe meet in the middle; build a magnetic lounge chair?
A bed with an array of strong permanent magnets, held in place with four tiny strings? What could possibly go wrong?
Gravity sucks. Remember that probe landing onto the comet? The comet’s gravity is like 1 / 60,000th of Earth’s gravity. If you weigh 80Kg/200lb here, you’d weigh 3 grams there. You could have the ultimate air mattress there in the form of computer fans, light beams and photocells. I guess the colonists would wear magnetic shoes or use a belt with computer fans to fly around like human blimps.
I clicked through a couple of links here and ended up on http://hackaday.com/2009/02/18/dirks-accident/
The link to magnetnerd dot com now goes to a domain reseller.
..guessing the nerd has some Dr bills to pay?
Just enable Flash and you’ll be good.