Magnetic Levitation Using Arduino

Overview

The magnet floating device operates using a small Hall Effect sensor where the field of the permanent magnet can be detected or be able to modulate the magnetic field of electromagnet.

Details

Separating the sensor from the electromagnet is one of the biggest challenges in designing this project. The stability was achieved by hovering a magnetic dart. One example after a good calibration is oscillation of the tiny magnet which can be kept very small, causing the magnet for minutes to be hovering. The sum of the fields of the floating magnet as well as the electromagnet pertains to the reading since the sensor is on the electromagnet.

The serial Arduino core library is not optimized for the ATmega128 microcontroller that it runs to, making it very slow. Although the library uses 16-bit variables and division with no reason, the ATmega128 is an 8-bit RISC processor without an instruction for division. An output buffer is not offered by the library so the programs are locked by the Serial.print methods which waits for one byte to be sent before the next one can be sent. To optimize for 8-bitm the wiring_serial.c file has to be modified.