Collaborate Disseminate
[Moritz v. Sivers] has a knack for making his own displays, which are typically based on some obscure physical effect. Magnetic viewing films, those thin plastic sheets that change color …read more Continue reading Moving Magnet Draws Stylish Shapes On Flexible Film
Modeling a railroad is hard. Railroads are large, linear pieces of civil engineering. So many modelers are drawn to the smallest scale they can use. Recently a new scale, named …read more Continue reading PCB Linear Motors For Model Trains
Are you still launching paper airplanes using your hands? That’s like a baby’s toy! [Tom Stanton] and his homebrew electromagnetic rail launcher are sure to bring your paper airplane game into …read more Continue reading Propel Paper Planes, Bisect Sausages With Electromagnets
Unless you have one large pile of cash to burn through, properly equipping a workshop can take years of burning through little piles of cash. Whether to save a bit of cash or simply for the challenge, [Workshop from Scratch] is doing exactly what his channel name suggests, and his …read more
Over on Hackaday.io we have a lot of people playing around with the possibilities presented by cheap printed circuit boards. Whether that means making a quadcopter from fiberglass or a speaker from etched copper, we’ve seen just about everything. Now, finally, we have a miniature magnetic racetrack. It’s an ant …read more
Continue reading Circular Linear Motor Becomes A Micro Motor Raceway
PCBs are exceptionally cheap now, and that means everyone gets to experiment with the careful application of copper traces on a fiberglass substrate. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Carl] is putting coils on a PCB. What can you do with that? Build a motor, obviously. This isn’t any motor, though: it’s a linear motor. If you’ve ever wanted a maglev train on a PCB, this is the project for you.
This project is a slight extension of [Carl]’s other PCB motor project, the aptly named PCB Motor. For this project, [Carl] whipped up a small, circular PCB with a few …read more
When we look back to the 1970s it is often in a light of somehow a time before technology, a time when analogue was still king, motor vehicles had carburettors, and telephones still had rotary dials.
In fact the decade had a keen sense of being on the threshold of an exciting future, one of supersonic air travel, and holidays in space. Some of the ideas that were mainstream in those heady days didn’t make it as far as the 1980s, but wouldn’t look out of place in 2018.
The unlikely setting for todays Retrotechtacular piece is the Bedford Levels, …read more
We’ve all heard linear motors, like those propelling Maglev trains, described as “unrolled” versions of regular electric motors. The analogy is apt and helps to understand how a linear motor works, but it begs the question: what if we could unroll the stator in two dimensions instead of just one?
That’s the idea behind [BetaChecker’s] two-axis stepper motor, which looks like it has a lot of potential for some interesting applications. Build details are sparse, but from what we can gather from the videos and the Hackaday.io post, [BetaChecker] has created a platen of 288 hand-wound copper coils, each of …read more
