Arduino Magnet Levitation – detailed description

Recently, I finished my first Arduino project, a magnet levitation device. It levitates a magnetic object under an electromagnet. What makes it different from similar projects is the position sensor for the feedback loop. I use a single Hall effect sensor placed directly on the bottom of the core of the electromagnet. This creates a problem of separating the electromagnet’s field from the levitating magnet’s field. Fortunately, this can be done in software by the microcontroller ATmega168 that is the heart of Arduino Duemilanove, the board that I use to control the levitation. This article gives a detailed description of the project together with source code at https://github.com/rekka/levitation, as I promised.

WARNING: This is an advanced project that requires quite a substantial amount of tweaking and understanding of the software internals to make it work. Please consider this post just a description of what I did. Furthermore, it is more than 3 years old and therefore hopelessly outdated; the software most likely needs nontrivial changes.

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My first Arduino project

It’s been only a couple weeks since I discovered Arduino, an open source microcontroller platform. I was looking for a cheap interface between my laptop and electronic circuits. Arduino with its price $35 and easy to use development environment was the best choice. So after getting my Arduino Duemilanove board and ordering some cheap components from AllElectronics, I had everything to start working on my old dream, making a magnet fly. Well, float.

Update: detailed description here

It took only a few days to figure out all the problems and my magnet floating device was born:

Floating a dart with Arduino

Here’s a video:

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