Developing with the idea
The common Christmas tree is often adorned with lights, a topper, some tinsel, and maybe most significantly, a plethora of ornaments. Dangling from their branches on tensioned items of string, there’s not a lot to them, at the least till YouTuber Sean Hodgins determined to take the idea and run with it. He wished to take away the string factor and change it with an electromagnet, thereby making a “magically” levitating decoration that by no means will get tangled.
Constructing an decoration that’s dangling mid-air might be completed in a few methods. The primary includes taking two everlasting magnets that all the time appeal to one another after which including some electromagnets inside one of many everlasting ones to repel the opposite facet if it will get too shut. Nevertheless, the added complexity and part value led Hodgins to a different resolution. Right here, a pair of 1 everlasting magnet and one electromagnet resist gravity when powered, with gravity pulling downwards when turned off. By quickly toggling energy states, no matter is connected to the everlasting magnet can hover.
{Hardware} and board design
With the design now sketched, Hodgins needed to discover a appropriate electromagnet that may not appeal to the everlasting magnet when unpowered. After selecting a naked coil, he related it to an older driver PCB and related a corridor impact sensor to one of many microcontroller’s analog inputs. This implies the MCU can flip the electromagnet on when the sensor’s studying is just too low after which off when the studying will get above a threshold. The PCB he created retains lots of the identical components from the driving force, together with a MOSFET, energy administration circuitry, and a microcontroller.
A setback
After ready for his PCBs to reach from the fab, Hodgins realized they’d arrive far too late, if in any respect, for his undertaking, so he needed to resort to constructing another decoration levitation circuit. This new {hardware} was comprised of an Adafruit Trinket M0 board mounted onto protoboard. 16 now-soldered and assembled boards later, it was lastly time to connect the 3D printed mounting {hardware} onto every protoboard.
Assembling a tree
For the tree, Hodgins eschewed a standard tree in favor of constructing one from scratch. It encompasses a picket base and strong milled aluminum pedestal, eight branches produced from clear plastic tubing, and loads of channels by which to route the wiring internally.
