This is a magnetic levitation desk art project inspired by HyperspacePirate's YouTube video.
|
|
|
I picked this project as I wanted to get more into electronics and making PCBs in KiCad, and I thought this would be a fun project to start with. The PCB was manufactured by JLCPCB, and I assembled it myself with the coil being hand-wound using the insulated conductor strands extracted from a CAT6 cable. I wound the coil until it reached a resistance of approximately 12Ω.
One really neat property of this magnetic levitation system is that it hardly takes any power at all when it's stable. I've seen the current draw as low as 0.01A when the system is in equilibrium.
Please note that the KiCad source is provided with a little embarassment, as this is one of the very first KiCad designs I made; things aren't done the best way on the scematic, including some issues around the way the op-amp symbol is done, as I didn't know how to do that properly at the time.
Mag-Lev KiCad Project Files: mag-lev-kicad.tar.gz
