Amuse your friends, amaze your enemies, and perplex ants and other insects, insofar as they are capable of perplexment. Accomplish all this and more with this handy dandy homebrew acoustic levitator.
Before anyone gets to thinking about using this technique to build a hoverboard that actually hovers, it’s best that you scale your expectations way, way down. Still, being able to float drops of liquid and small life forms is no mean feat, and looks like a ton of fun to boot. [Asier Marzo]’s Instructable’s post fulfills a promise he made when he first published results for what the popular press then breathlessly dubbed a “tractor beam,” which we covered back in January. This levitator clearly has roots in the earlier work, what with 3D-printed hemispherical sections bristling with ultrasonic transducers all wired in phase. A second section was added to create standing acoustic waves in the middle of the space, and as the video below shows, just about anything light enough and as least as cooperative as an ant can be manipulated in the Z-axis.
There’s plenty of room to expand on [Asier]’s design, and probably more practical applications than annoying bugs. Surface-mount devices are pretty tiny — perhaps an acoustic pick and place is possible?
Funny :)
Time to get my 3D Printer hot … again ! (I’m sure Hackaday have action in plastic spool company … he he )
Thanks for sharing this one ;)
That narrator voice is somehow hypnotizing.
It used to be just magnifying glasses were all you needed to torture ants. Now this..
Imagine the fun of combining them…. BWAHAHAH!!!
Considering that the ants can actually sense ultrasound, and it’s also imparting quite a bit of energy as heat, it must be quite a torture.
Do dogs hear the ‘sound’?
How much sound is coming from it?
The scope in the video shows 40KHz, and with those voltages I take a wild guess at >100dBA
Need a Bigger Transducer array and have Scorpion Floaty fighting and a betting system running a web server ?
next project…gotta fire-up the old M2
Pissing off pests for fun and profit!