Mag-Lev Lemming Refuses To Fall

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://hackaday.com/2026/02/19/mag-lev-lemming-refuses-to-fall/

magnetic

#MacroPhotographyStyle #Glass #MetalObject #MagneticLevitation #ColorfulComponents #PatternedSurface #BlurredFloralBackground #Img2Img #AiArt #AiArtists #StableDiffusion

Development Of Magnetic Locking Idea Shows Great Progress

No matter how its done, with whatever level of fakery, magnetic levitation just looks cool. We don't know about you, but merely walking past the tackiest gadget shop, the displays of levitating and rotating objects always catches our eye. Superconductors aside, these devices are pretty much all operating in the same way; an object with a permanent rare-earth magnet is held in a stable position between a pair of electromagnets one above and one below, with some control electronics to adjust the field strength and close the loop.

But, there may be another way, albeit a rather special case, where a magnet can not only be levitated, but locked in place using a rotating magnetic field. The video shows a demonstration of how the mass of a magnet can be used to phase lock it against a rotating field. In essence, the magnet will want to rotate to align with the rotating magnetic field, but its mass will mean there is a time delay for the force to act and rotation to occur, which will lag the rotating magnetic field, and if it is phased just so, the rotation will be cancelled and the magnet will be locked in a stable position. Essentially the inertia of the magnet can be leveraged to counteract magnet's tendency to rapidly rotate to find a stable position in the field.

Whilst the idea is not new, Turkish experimenter [Hamdi Ucar] has been working on this subject for some time (checkout his YouTube channel for a LOT of content on it), even going as far as to publish a very detailed academic paper on the subject. With our explanation here we're trying to simplify the subject for the sake of brevity, but since the paper has a lot of gory details for the physicists among you, if you can handle the maths, you can come to your own conclusions.

Thanks [keith] for the tip!

#mischacks #magneticlevitation #magneticlocking

Fail of the Week: Magnetic Levitation

We are big fans of the little desktop magnetic levitation setups that float a small object on a magnet. As [3D Printed Life] points out, they look like magic. He was surprised that the commercial units use analog electronics. He decided to build a digital version but didn't know what he was getting into. He details his journey in the video you can see below.

Along with a custom control board, he decided to wind his own electromagnets. After finding that tedious he built a simple coil winder to automate some of the work.

If you have ever struggled to find the sweet spot for the magnet on one of these, his first problem was completely predictable. He lost control of the magnet which slammed against the PCB and either physically or electrically damaged the magnetic sensor. After that, he installed a shield to prevent the magnet from directly contacting the board.

The first iteration didn't work as expected and the magnetic platform kept flipping over. He eventually found a teardown of a commercial unit that showed he needed more stabilizing magnets around the outside of the electromagnets. He also didn't have the electromagnets set for reversing the polarity.

Solving the polarity problems required repurposing an H bridge circuit that you usually see for motor control. A new board fried after a little testing. Then there was a mechanical failure.

Once the hardware was working, the software posed its own problems. A PID controller wasn't stable enough. He also tried filtering inputs and adding some other corrections. The platform would float a little but eventually will crash to the electromagnets.

He didn't get a final working build but he's hoping someone will be able to give him some advice on getting it working. We figured someone who reads Hackaday has certainly built one of these before and might be able to help.

Maybe a change in axis would be easier. There are several older projects that might provide some inspiration.

#microcontrollers #mischacks #controlloop #maglev #magneticlevitation #pid