Floating in Air

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The Bad Driver List from I Have The Power! There are more idiots on the roads these days than good drivers. When you find yourself in a near fender-bender with a wannabe Mad Max, what recour...

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Terry Costlow, Contributing Editor -- Design News, January 7, 2008

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A great thing about college demonstration projects is they don't have to have any commercial prospects. That's a good thing for students at the Milwaukee School of Engineering, who call their model an anti-gravity device. Despite that moniker, the machine uses the same principles that let high-speed magnetic levitation trains float above their tracks. The MSOE levitator uses analog instrumentation amplifiers donated by Analog Devices, a pulse-width modulated H-bridge from National Semiconductor, a coil, a feedback control compensator and Allegro MicroSystems Hall-effect sensors to magnetically suspend an object in mid-air.