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.
Here’s another one (heard on the net)..: The release date of the Sony Playstation is closer to the first manned moon landings than it is to our present! :D
Great information shared.. really enjoyed reading this post thank you author for sharing this post .. appreciated
Any info on the control scheme used to keep the Lemming floating? (Can’t watch the Video right now, but it seems the Arduino code is not added to the zip-file.)
You’re the first person to notice. I’ll update the zip file shortly!
Now added, sorry about that!
Now please apologize for the fact that ever since I first read this article an hour ago, I have had the Lemmings Amiga theme-music running non-stop through my head 🙂
Seriously though, congrats on a cool build. Thought about Etsying your creations? I don’t have a 3D printer, or indeed any hardware skill beyond being able to spell “Arduino”, but am jealous of this Lemmings one!
I love it, need one!
Wonder whether it is possible to do maglev between multiple electromagnets, rather than just one on top? Thinking of being able to “drop” the lemming through the trapdoor and catch and suspend it on the way down! :-)
I’m envisioning a series of tiny lemmings “floating” down in an ultrasonic levitation rig, then falling into “lava” at the bottom and being recycled to the top.
I really like that… I was wondering what I was going to do with the electromagnet I bought on a whim from adafruit… Never occurred to me to do a ‘floating’ type project. Doesn’t have to be a Lemming of course. Anyway, cool beans.