Collaborate Disseminate
[Drew Pilcher] needed durable, custom-wound coils with no core, and perfectly flat sides. Coils can be wound by hand, of course, but reliably creating perfect coils with thin wire and …read more Continue reading Tips for Winding Durable Coils with Nice, Flat Sides
An electromagnetic coil gun takes a line of electromagnets working together to form a moving electromagnetic field. These fields accelerate a project and boom, you have electricity moving matter, often at an impressive rate of speed.
[Carl Bugeja] has taken the idea and in a sense turned it upon its head with his flexible PCB actuator. Now the line of electromagnets are the moving part and the magnetic object the stationary one. There is still a line of flat PCB inductors in the classic coil gun configuration, but as the title suggests on a flexible substrate.
The result is a …read more
Occasionally we come across a piece of information which reminds us that, while flying cars are still nowhere to be found, we’re definitely living in the future. Usually it’s about some new application of artificial intelligence, or maybe another success in the rapidly developing field of private spaceflight. But sometimes it’s when you look at a website and say to yourself: “Oh cool, they have 1.5kW electromagnetic accelerators in stock.”
ArchLabs, a partnership between [David Wirth] and [Jason Murray], have put their EMG-01A Gauss gun up for sale for anyone who’s brave enough and willing to put down $1,000 USD …read more
It’s huge, it’s unwieldy, and it takes 45 seconds to shoot all three rounds in its magazine. But it’s a legitimate semi-automatic railgun, and it’s pretty awesome.
Yes, it has its limits, but every new technology does, especially totally home-brew builds like this. The aptly named [NSA_listbot] has been putting a lot of work into his railgun, and this is but the most recent product of an iterative design cycle.
The principle is similar to other railguns we’ve featured before, which accelerate projectiles using rapidly pulsed electromagnets. The features list in the video below reads like a spec for a …read more
Whenever we see a coil gun project on the Internet, it seems to involve a bank of huge capacitors. [miroslavus] took a different approach with his gun–he wanted his project to be built without those monster caps.
It’s powered by quadcopter LiPo batteries, 2x 1400 MaH drone batteries wired up in series and triggering 21SWG copper coils that [miroslavus] created with the help of a custom 3D-printed winding rig he designed. The rigs have ridges to help you lay the coils down neatly, and they also have mounts for photodiodes, ensuring the gun knows when it’s loaded.
When triggered, the …read more
A common complaint in the comments of many a Hackaday project is: Why did they use a microcontroller? It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback someone else’s design, but it’s rare to see the OP come back and actually prove that a microcontroller was the best choice. So when [GreatScott] rebuilt his recent DIY coil gun with discrete logic, we just had to get the word out.
You’ll recall from the original build that [GreatScott] was not attempting to build a brick-wall blasting electromagnetic rifle. His build was more about exploring the concepts and working up a viable control mechanism for …read more
Continue reading DIY Coil Gun Redux: Life Really is Easier with Arduino
There’s something attractive about coil guns, especially big ones. It’s probably the danger; between the charge stored in banks of capacitors and the flying projectiles, big coil guns can be lethal to experiment with. But there is a lot to be learned from how coil guns work, especially if you build this 3D-printed entry-level coil gun.
For the coil gun newbie, [Great Scott] does a fantastic job of explaining the basics. Pulsing the coil at just the right time will suck a ferromagnetic projectile into the coil core and let momentum fling it out, and multiple coils used correclty improve …read more
Continue reading Coil Gun for Newbies: Learning Electromagnetic Propulsion
