Hacksmith Industries was inspired by Captain America’s shield action in Avengers: Age of Ultron and made an electromagnet to work with their Captain America shield. It means you can throw and catch the shield just like Cap — well, almost like him. James goes over the details of making the electromagnet in the above video and also in a post at Hacksmith Industries. He says:
We first experimented with the primary coil of a microwave transformer and these worked pretty well. Good strength but a lot of current and a lot of heat which is a problem for wearable tech. Magnetic force if linearly proportional to both the number of coils and current. Therefore by increasing the number of coils, we can reduce the current and heat while maintaining the same magnetic force. Instead of winding thousands of coils ourselves, we bought some industrial electromagnets from Amazon. These things are powerful! At just 12v and 1.5A they will lift over 260 lbs. That means by running them at 72V, each magnet will pull close to 1600lbs… for a short period of time before they overheat and burn out.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
