Playing with: Magnetic Levitation Platform

good morning all a plain white box let's open it instruction manual for correct application of floating display power supply it's a European to pin some circular object in there and a silver box so this is a fairly solid looking metal box some screws on the bottom so we can take it apart there's a hole there for the power supply but that's it it's got a sort of mag mirror finish hello right we're going to need some mains we're going to have to adapt that down to European to pin and now I can plug this in I don't know how you Europeans put up with these feeble little plugs they're just a bit knotty aren't they plug that in and it's all wobbly that's not very good electrics is it I mean to misquote Crocodile Dundee that's not a plug this is a plug right let's put this in and we get four LEDs then I think they're shining inwards to kind of illuminate the thing what we're going to put on here okay let's just put this wobbly plug over there out of the way for the moment and there now we take this disk out of this bag that's the top and we place it on here there it is it floats so yes this is a magnetic levitation device is the magnet and it just sits floating on top of well what I think must be four electromagnet because you've got four LEDs here and as you move this magnet yes it doesn't take much to make it jump out of its magnetic field that's quite a powerful neodymium magnet and then you've got to place it back in the field and you've gotta get it quite accurate otherwise it just hops off the top now fortunately this magnet is supplied with a rubber sort of coating because I think if that magnet hit I don't know this is needed Immy immensely it's a powerful magnet but if that hit this metal box then it might well shatter so yes that comes in a little rubber surround but I found actually that it helps to put this piece of foam that came with the unit on top of here because then if you make mistakes and drop it on there you're much less likely to have problems and you can it and you can practice with this for lights thing and you're trying to get these four lights I'll do a top you in a minute tour come on so you can find the position where this sits in that magnetic field and its control presumably by feedback control loops so let's do this from above so that you can see how the lights help guide you into the position where this is being controlled there it is floating and spinning and you can see that if I move it really just tiny amounts a millimetre also how the LED brightness gives you an indication of where the center point is and yeah that sits in there it seems to take quite a lot of weight I can push down quite hard on that so I'll test the weight carrying capability in a moment this call spins freely because this magnet has presumably north well I'm north might be on top South on the bottom or vice versa let's have a look at the feedback control in action so with the magnet floating if I press down on it I can set up quite oscillation there and it's really under damped so these feedback control loops are soon as well there are four feedback control loops are really under damped they're very very high gain very sensitive because the presumably though you've got to work really quite quickly to keep this thing sitting on that magnetic field you don't have to push it far out until it just jumps out of its magnetic sort of center position find that you can just about feel it it kind of resists and then you feel this central position where it seems to just sort of lock in but it's not very big that's all and you can't get it to make em some quite funny noises so that's squeaking it's one of the control loops kind of responding in some way I don't quite know what it's doing these things click on and off if you and you can feel a distinct you might be able to just see it where it suddenly pulls in and then releases it's really quite odd so you're trying to find that midpoint where all four of them are kind of communicating with the magnet in the same way to get the magnetic levitation floating point so how high does it float well this piece of air board is about 6/10 of an inch so it's probably around that just over half an inch of course the reflection in the mirror finished metal case makes it look double that of course now will it take my little bucket of offcut clippings yes of course that's that's one of the problems if you put something magnetic onto this then it all goes haywire but it's carrying that torch there which is throwing a really interesting beam of light around the room yeah that's good fun right for this piece of foam back because I want to let's just get that centered it does pull very hard it's got powerful magnets it is centered and I want to put something really quite heavy on that right let's try this 500 gram so half a kilo reel of tinned copper wire now I'm not getting much interaction magnetically presumably because this is largely copper but that's pushed that right down onto the foam so can it support that without the foam yeah just about it's kind of tipping over rather alarming because I think the centre of gravity is rather high yeah so that is supporting half a kilo I don't think it could take much more than that I could take a little bit more cuz I can press down on that and it's still supporting it it does have a bit of a lien on it though and I've tried centering this up on the magnet and that seems to make it worse rather than better so I'm just wondering if perhaps this magnet which is where it seems to be leaning is a little less powerful than the other three and so yeah there's a little bit tipped over yeah it's handling half a kilo reasonably well that's put a bit of Bounce in there bit more yeah it's quite bouncy and you can see the LEDs responding to the changing magnetic field now the manual doesn't say a lot really it says connected up it's got a little bit on how to find the alignment point the centre point which you can pretty much work out for yourself but it does stay in here there's an automatic temperature switch the device may cut off his circuitry if you fail to float the magnet after many attempts and I presume that because without the magnet there these coils get hot I don't know why they would but that's what it's implying let's try and find that centre point again there it is and here's another indication that there's some sort of feedback going on here if I press it down I can induce until it leaps off the magnetic field I can induce some strange buzzing and humming and I was wondering whether it could levitate other types of magnets I've got some little neodymium magnets here but they it just doesn't there's no response from these LEDs that I can feel a pull and I can Center it but it just won't trigger the feedback control loop so it's just just pulls to whichever corner I put it nearest doing it it just won't sit in the middle there at all and I thought I'd try this Malta goes over fridge magnet there's nothing there's nothing there it's just not powerful enough right I think it's time to take a look inside here so a screwdriver at the ready I suppose I should unplug it um let's start undoing these screws yeah quite tightly done up these and about half the height of the unit I suppose the screw length oh well this is interesting and this is actually plastic it's one he's very convincing silvered plastics they're really quite good now there's a huge circular madness in here it's quite warm actually and four coils has a bit of like metal detritus on there yeah that's interesting oh that actually comes out oh wow there are a lot of MOSFETs on the back several chips some things here which are obviously used for alignment so I wonder if I could align it so that the magnets it's a little bit flatter on top mmm how interesting right I've powered it up let's see if I got be careful here because if that whacks these coils I don't want it to do that it's just gonna cause problems but can I float this yes there we are that's floating there yeah yes I can put my pin underneath it so yeah that's fine as a couple of pots here dare I twiddle though if I do I'll probably never get it working again and with their case off you can probably see better how as I disturbed this it turns these LEDs on and off oh that's not killer it's not going to survive many of those is it right transistors we've got some d88 twos oh and b77 twos be 7 7 2 d 8 8 2 so it looks like they're in complementary pairs some sort of push-pull arrangement and 3 2 4 LM 3 2 4 so a couple of quad op amps a 406 6 now is that some sort of analogue switch can't quite remember LM 3 5 8 op amp there and something called a 4 4 1 9 which I don't recognize the number now there's a little pair of crossed PCBs in the center here and one device sitting on the top so is that a Hall effect device there are also couple of devices down there sort of kind of facing each other can't see that very well but they're there but they're not on the other corners of the board so yeah two devices lower down and this one device at the top which is really quite strange I don't know whether it's using a Hall effect to send to the magnet on the magnetic field I was using some sort of feedback from the current in the windings but maybe that Hall effect is used to initially that's quite powerful pull to initially detect this magnet going on top and to switch on the feedback control loops maybe something like that well I can't resist twiddling these pots I've no idea what they do they don't say let's try this first one first is it doing anything I'm trying to remember the number of turns I don't think it's doing much they're not haven't got red loctite on them so they haven't been locked in any particular position let's try this one mmm they don't seem to do a lot how come everything we're now oh well it's working so I don't know what those do but I thought I'd go handheld on the camera because it's hard to see with a static shot just what this looks like that if I sort of Rove around you can see that that unquestionably floating rotate it yeah it's a really interesting device I'm not sure what you would actually do with it I suppose display your latest gadget spinning round and round on the top of a magnetic field and let's just do this oscillation thing again if I press down I'm just doing it just now yeah a real you can get it to vibrator miss sounds a bit loud 50 Hertz but this is DC of course oh yeah so this is already interesting and oh gosh it's pretty vicious when it grabs it you're interesting and curious device I don't know much about the science of magnetics but I mean fun to play with yeah if you can get that bang off hit levitates it's quite fun does get quite warm though it's all pretty on the back and actually very warm on those transistors I'm pretty sure these are bipolars as I seem to remember the d88 2 from the super capacitor Protection Board yeah I think these are bipolar pairs so they are going to get quite warm MOSFETs I don't know why they didn't use MOSFETs but yeah very interesting device yeah so what what an amusing device um this one very kindly supplied by banggood.com I'll put a link in the description below the video if you want to take a look at this on Bangladesh I'd so yeah an interesting and curious device and under how much weight of water it can take yeah not bad magnetic levitation folks cheerio

Channel: Julian Ilett

Views: 279,675

Keywords: electronics, inductor, magnet, neodymium

Id: TFWeEL63Hzs

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018