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Functioning Hoverboard Unveiled (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Last year, a company called Arx Pax set up a Kickstarter campaign to develop a functioning hoverboard. Now, the company has demonstrated an updated version of the device, which is fully capable of hovering over a surface made out of conductive metal (video on YouTube). CEO Greg Henderson said, "The hover engine creates a primary magnetic field which is then put over a candidate surface like aluminum or copper. The hover engine then creates swirls of electricity and those create a secondary magnetic field, which propels the firsts." The device is expensive; Arx Pax is delivering a handful of units to Kickstarter backers who contributed $10,000. It's out of the reach of typical consumers, but it does seem to work. Plus, the company is sharing their magnetic field technology with teams taking part in the competition to build pods for a prototype of Elon Musk's Hyperloop vacuum tube transportation system.
This. For surface independence, try developing plasma levitation instead.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
We've been doing maglev for quite a while now, though few people tried to ride them like a skateboard before.
No kidding.
The electrical demos in Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry had a demonstrator in the late '50s. It was a half-transformer-like device about the size of a small outside unit for a whole-house air conditioner - a cylinder about 3 feet across and three feet high.
It generated a large, repulsive, "elevator field" in the center - over the bulk of the upper surface, and a slightly inward-directed "fence field" around the perimiter, to keep whatever it was floating centered.
What they usually floated was a metal (copper?) disk about 3 feet across, which floated maybe 6 inches above the device. They could angle the fence field slightly and make the disk spin slowly. The guy demonstrating it also removed the device by holding a second, slightly larger, disk just below it and edging it into the field from the side. When this was moved into the fence field it disrupted it at that spot, so the remaining fields convenient spit the disk onto this "hot tray.
And hot tray it was. The disk got hot from the eddy currents. The demonstrator said they had considered using this as a stovetop (anticipating induction cooktops, but with levitation) but it hadn't worked out.
Came back a decade later and they were still using it - but the sides of the disk had gotten folded upward about 30 degrees and somewhat randomly, turning it into an artsy-looking bowl. Seems somebody had left it floating long enough for the metal to soften, and the fence fields had pushed it up.
Miniaturizing the elevator-field portion of this, probably raising the frequency, and turning it upside down, with field-shape tweaks to keep it level, would produce an over-a-conductive-plate hoverboard. Tweak the fence fields into a couple linear motors along the edge to provide propulsion and steering. (You might even be able to set up the fields so you accelerate, brake, and steer by tilting, making local effects stronger on particular regions of the edge by bringing the pole pieces closer to the conductive surface.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way