hoverboard

It dosent work for fat guys;)

Cheers

They are idiots, that so-called improvement of angling the mag pods should have been thought of INITIALLY.

Oh, toss the magnetics completely and use fans fer one "unique" idea..

Then you have to consider motors, batteries and/or power transfer, additional weight and size. Soon you are talking about hovering cars rather than boards.

Yeah, I guess that's why bumble bees can't fly.

What's funny is that there is no way for the rider to apply lateral forces, namely to steer. They keep falling off.

Fans in hovercraft mode have the same steering problem, but might use less power.

How is it supposed to work? You can't hover in the Earth's field--any attempt to do that gets dominated by local paramagnetism. If it's AC, it could work on a copper sheet, but not on the street.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The four round outriggers each contain a motor spinning a downward facing Halbach array, probably constructed using rare earth magnets.

The big rectangular thing between the four outriggers is the battery.

The spinning field induces eddy currents in the copper or aluminum sheet, which by Lenz's Law mst generate an opposing magnetic field, so spinning halbach rotor repels the metal sheet.

The inventor has a number of patents on this, but the patents are nearly incomprehensible - the patent lawyer probably did not understand how this worked, and so threw up a shield of pure blather.

If you listen carefully to the video, you can hear the rotors spinning up when the hoverboard is turned on. My guess is that the halbach rotors spin at 5,000 to 10,000 rpm.

Joe Gwinn

ea..

tional weight and size. Soon you are talking about hovering cars rather tha n boards.

Bumble bees weight around 0.0001 pound. For Jumbo bees (human) that are 10

Holy moly! Did you see the TWO guys pick it up? Judging from the way they carried it, it REQUIRED two people to lift it! Must be a TON of magnets in the rotors. This Halback scheme can't be terribly efficient, I wonder how many minutes you get on one charge? I'd guess not a lot.

Jon

It's easy to be a naysayer

I typically avoid them at work for brainstorming sessions etc

Do you know of any products we use that was said to be a wild goose chase initially?

Granted, it does not look stable right now

Regards

Klaus

Let those guys have their creative fun.

And just what creative thing did you do today? This week? This year?

Huh?

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Let those guys have their creative fun.

And just what creative thing did you do today? This week? This year?

Huh?

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Very possibly, putting some gyros in it and some way to control the levitating force, maybe kind of a mixture of a Segway and a quadcopter, might allow you to steer the thing by how you apply weight to the board. That would make it a lot more usable than what they were showing, which seemed to behave like it was an air bearing. No coupling between the floor and the board in any direction. I'm sure kids could learn to do tricks with it like they learn how to do stuff on typical boards, but it doesn't seem real useful.

Also, I am really pretty sure this thing weighs a **LOT** by the way the 2 guys carried it, maybe 60+ Lbs. so that is also going to be a negative.

Almost everything from TVs to home computers to cell phones were probably considered way too blue-sky to ever catch on except in really special cases. And, I'm sure self-propelled cars, flying machines and steam engines had their naysayers in their time.

Jon

Oh, lots of stuff. Well, as of Sunday morning, only one today.

Invention consists of having tons of wild ideas, and then filtering out all but the ones that might be practical. Both parts of the process are necessary.

Skateboards with wheels work fine, and don't need giant batteries or copper floors. This thing is an attempt to crowdfund based on the anniversary of Back To The future. Using this mechanism to protect buildings from earthquakes is nuts.

Seems to me that tons of wild ideas are being created these days, but not much filtering is going on. That pattern will continue as long as silly ideas get funded. The same thing is happening in science... a dozen breakthroughs per day. I blame the Internet.

Well, I learned about Halbach arrays, which is kinda cool.

Absolutely!

That is why they bumble around (and not fly).

Never on the street, as the copper would be stolen ten milliseconds after it was put in place.

Maglev is always fun. Not least when superconducting magnets quench.

Only if you apply the formula for a fixed wing aircraft out of context.

Much like the human body might be expected to fly apart if we were only gravitationally bound like stars. Our mass is insufficient for gravity to hold our body together against radiation pressure using the standard formula for stellar atmospheres. Thank heavens for electromagnetism!

I think most frig magnets are Halback arrays. You can sometimes run a small permanent magnet along them and feel the changing field... on the "sticky" side. (They will only stick on the frig on one side.)

George H.