The machine for making those has been around for several years.[1] TechShop in San Francisco has one, along with the design software. I've never seen it used. The machine for making them is just an XY table with a small, high power magnetizing coil; it's the design software that's the clever part.
An obvious application is self-aligning connectors. Magnetic connectors have been around for years, but, like Apple's discontinued magnetic charger plug, they usually have some mechanical alignment guides. A completely flat connector is now possible.
While MagSafe is not featured in the new MacBook, MacBook Pros and MacbookAirs still have them and I believe they'll have them for the time to come. New MacBook is an exercise in minimalism but it does not appeal to most of the people who still have tons of pluggable devices lying around. So MagSafe is not discontinued at all.
Is this the "Magnetic printer" thing they have collecting dust in the corner there? I've always wondered what that was but never found any information on it. I thought it was just some one off.
I was an active TechShop member in July / August 2015 to build an art project for Burning Man [1]. My friend and I were there Monday through Friday, it felt like it was our office.
Overall, the experience was very good, we learned a ton of things, met interesting people, such as a guy who explained in details how to use that magnet printer, and some mechanical engineers building a cool sandwich-making robot which later turned out to be a YC company. We had a lot of fun.
However, as soon as our project was completed, we discontinued our membership. TechShop's pricing is weird: it's either insanely cheap if you're working on a project full time (I would have paid 2 times the amount no problem), or it's prohibitively expensive if you're just there 2-3 times a month.
Nice project and write up! (I didn't make it there last year, so I didn't see it...)
Curious, was this a first BM project? (It's certainly up at the level of complexity that very often completely misses the deadline and either gots take out to the desert half-done, taken out a year later than planned, or abandoned altogether.)
Hi! Thanks for the kind words. Yes, this was a first BM project - a first hardware project, really. I had never played with microcontrollers or CNC machines before. The fact that everything worked on first try, on schedule, came as a major surprise to everybody, myself included.
I think the key is to choose your complexity. Some things may look complex, but they are actually just the juxtaposition of some simple, repeated elements.
Ironically (speaking as a software engineer), the one thing that we didn't finish on time was the software. We ended up running some simple code to power the colors, as opposed to the fancy fluid simulation that I had originally envisioned (http://gregschlom.com/flow-and-wonder/)
I've been a member since the days of the original Menlo Park TechShop. It was once a fun place. Then they moved to a temporary location next to the garbage transfer station in San Carlos, and membership went down. Then they moved to a third location in Redwood City, and, a year after the move, some of the walls are still just plastic sheets, some of the machines still aren't connected, and they lack facilities they used to have, such as an area for spray painting. Many members quit.
So basically like every hackerspace. I think municipalities need to really get behind hackerspaces as a concept if they're to survive the next few years.
I think hackerspaces simply have a turnover, a lifecycle. In the last few years both of my favorite local hackerspaces have closed or become moribund, but others have appeared, and maybe I'll like them.
I played around with the software and printed some magnets about a year ago. Never came up with a production use beyond hanging pictures on my wall though.
I've used it but it's only good for making magnets and most people need something more than just a magnet. A table saw on the other hand is a tool good for many projects and purposes.
It's pretty cool really, the software isn't too bad (as compared with other CNC software). The machine is definitely a one-off unique thing it's serial number is 0002!
They should use real video on their homepage instead of CGI. I immediately thought this had to be a scam until I watched the Smarter Every Day video linked in the commments.
I'm very surprised these haven't taken off by now. They seem extremely useful and these guys have been pushing them for several months now if not longer.
It’s been a few years. I agree the technology is very clever and should be widely applicable.
I think not enough industrial designers / mechanical engineers have played with them yet to really explore possible uses, other than a few simple things like cabinet latches and magnets for hanging art on walls with iron-filing paint.
From what I understand, a bunch of their funding came from the Navy, who wanted to use them for transferring torque on ships without a solid (breakable) shaft.
Anyone in SF can sign up for a TechShop membership and go play with the CMR magnet printer they have there.
The one thing that prevents them from entering customer market in every day use is that magnets can affect many things.
Simple example - I had cover for my phone with a magnet closure. It wasnt affecting my phone in any way, but few times I put parking card next to it and it wiped out all the information from it forcing me to chasing parking office to get it re-printed.
But wouldn't this be the solution to your problem? If the pole reversals are tightly packed, it looks like the field lines could be designed to not affect other objects, even in close proximity.
As long as facing right direction. Its just one example and actually quite good - I would keep initially the ticket inside of the case, so it would come close to magnet anyways.
When I was at uni we spent some time in the lab playing around with Magneto-optical film and polarized light, it was supposed to demo the Kerr Effect. I had fun with an old floppy disk - you could bring a bar magnet close to the disk's film and watch the magnetic domains flip under the microscope.
Would be pretty cool to print some patterns using this technology and view it the same way.
Applied Science (which has many great videos) recently did that demonstration using an old magneto-optical removable disk. He was able to get a very nice example of the effect that is visible with the naked eye.
Even it looks pretty cool, they're unlikely to get adoption because it's not clear to their target market what their benefit is. One way to solve this is to actually take one of the applications and do it themselves and drive interest in the technology.
I disagree. They show spring-type applications, things precisely going back to alignment, etc. Industrial engineers should be able to take these higher-level concepts and put them in their toolchest
With a mix of permamagnetic polymagnets, electropermanent magnet arrays plus classical electromagnets, you could definitely do that.
You could have certain static guiding patterns, switchable EPM arrays for creating modifiable sub-patterns (and strengths) within the static ones, and the electromagnets for finely adjusting strengths and for pulling objects around.
For one, EPM:s could be used for programmable attachment/removal to a magnetic guiding system by either attracting an object with the polymagnet spring mechanism and then letting it into a magnetic rail, or by pushing it off by mirroring its magnetic field.
I think that's a bad idea. Many hardware technology start-ups go down the path of forward-integrating in order to drive adoption. To do this, they end up investing massive amounts in developing the end product, instead of on the specific feature.
I'm guessing their magnetism will be worn down by use (they're standard magnetized permamagnets), but it will happen over years in normal circumstances. The time depends on heat, currents (should be minimal) and opposing magnetic forces (relatively small here). Also impacts.
I have a pair of magnetic finger implants. Afters seeing how detailed their printing was, my first thought was using metal as a medium to send secret messages. A magnetic brail if you will.
I'm imagining how this could be used for board of games (magnetic dice and boards, changing the landing paths and probabilities of outcomes, and much more), and for hinges (imagine multitools with a few magnets used as switches to lock/unlock and open it up one-handed), etc...
Combine this tech with electropermanent magnets like Project Ara originally was set to use (an array of switchable small magnets) and you could do ridiculously cool things!
I thought of another thing: you could use a combo of permanent and electropermanent magnets with a magnetometer to make buttons on a surface that are flat across the surface when the device is off, and that raises up to a specific distance when switched on (like the polymagnet spring example that when rotated becomes attractive like a regular magnet).
Then you also adjust the magnetism so that at a given distance you can feel a "click" feedback when you push the button down. You could even have controllable variable resistance and click depth, depending on what you're doing. A gaming mode, a typing mode, a casual mode, etc...
No need for mechanical switches and buttons, just an attachment to hold the buttons in place.
So you could have a completely flat folding keyboard that then has the buttons raise up like on a standard keyboard, feeling like a standard keyboard, yet with 10x the longevity.
Better yet: make a surface with an array of electropermanent magnets and magnetometers, let each key have a Qr code like magnetic pattern with "magnetic anchors" plus a key identifier, and then you can place arbitary keys in arbitary positions to make yourself a keyboard looking however you want with no other manual work than key placement!
You could even have keys that can rotate or slide and even have switches, and the keyboard's magnetometers would identify the key patterns and your computer would download the instructions for parsing the inputs from that key.
Someone needs to give this company a marketing budget...
Is there a catch i'm really not getting, because these seem WAY too good to be true, and i'm really surprised that they aren't being used literally everywhere already.
One of catches that I can think of is a danger of swallowing a couple of them. For example, there is a special regulation regarding small magnets in objects that children can access. If they cling inside a body through some tissue, one will need a very nasty emergency surgery. It's not made easier by the fact that most surgical instruments are made from steel.
First of all it takes some mental adjustment to start designing things with these. Engineers need to build experience to avoid designs where unexpected forces of movements causes internal lockups due to misalignment, for example.
Second, the feedback isn't immediate in the way a physical object is, magnetism is always "springy". That means hybrid designs for many kinds of mechanisms with both mechanical and magnetic parts - see the paragraph above again for why this can be complex.
And then there's limits to the range, precision and maximum forces it can handle vs regular mechanical components.
Although over time I do expect it to show up in more and more places as it gets better understood, where these designs start to substitute classical mechanical designs where they're both good enough and more durable.
Somebody needs to get a few of these to Ben Heckendorn (Ben Heck @ Newark a.k.a. element14's Youtube channel), as well as a tutorial on designing them and let him run with it. There's some incredible things to be made from these -- my first thought was some custom pinball play-field uses, crazy stuff that couldn't be done without these "magnets with custom 3d-printable mag-field paths". Among many other awesome ideas I'm sure he'd use them for.
Since I'm currently trying to convince myself not to buy a pinball table that was one of my first initial thoughts as well. They should probably get in contact with an engineer from Stern.
The examples all seem to only work in two dimensions. "Spring" and "latch" need external alignment to keep them on the same axis, and "align" only works when the magnets are touching. Is that just because the magnets themselves are flat? Can you use this technology to do stable 3-dimensional positioning? There are all sorts of possibilities for frictionless bearings and so forth if you can.
I'm imagining a gearing system full of magnets instead of gears, and simplified hinges where instead of having 10 moving parts allowing a door to "fold away" you have one or two hinge pieces and 2-4 static magnets that have their magnetic fields control the same motion. Stuff that typically use rails and levers to guide movement could be simplified with magnets.
The animations are so easy to understand, they could have produced them without any sound, and they would still be internationally comprehensible. Also, without sound they could have reduced the pauses to at most half of their length. As of now, these pauses make the videos a bit boring to watch.
But they should have used real videos instead of computer animations - that would have been even more convincing.
Mainly in that you can customize the pattern. As far as I know the fridge magnets are a series of N/S stripes that are made by driving a long coil with AC and running the film past it at a speed tied to the mains frequency.
I wonder what the environmental constraints and strength of these are relative to neodymium magnets...? I could see them being used to reduce the cost and / or increase the efficiency of small brushless motors.
So the magnets are essentially programmable and "3d printable"? I know nothing about magnets...can you "wipe" them and reprint with a different pattern? If so and the 3d printer can be reasonably miniaturized I'm envisioning a robot with an attached mini 3d printer that can print task specific magnet tools :D
These are the kind of permanent magnets that you magnetize with currents and strong magnetic fields, so yes. You can alter their magnetic fields by exposing them to adjusted currents and magnetizing fields that undoes the original magnetization and remagnetizes them.
Note that your robot won't be very small - you need a lot of current, and thus cooling if the programmer is small, batteries that's big enough and you need to avoid ferromagnetic objects in the surroundings = shielding.
I believe the accuracy you want depends on the coupling faces of the magnet. If you have 3 or more 'spots' that match up of equal size and mirrored placement, I'm quite sure the alignment would continuously be sub millimeter, but this assumes there's no external force on the magnets since an inward force could create substantial friction to keep the alignment from being perfect. Likewise with a lateral force.
If you want it to be less accurate and leave some room for error then I'm sure you can offset each mirrored 'spot' off slightly in different directions so they're all equally lop sided with respect to each other.
Presumably it could scale all the way down to the domains on a hard-disk platter, but there are probably intermediate ranges of magnetic domain size where no practical techniques are available.
Google for "weston bye magnetic gear clock". Note its not as convenient as you might think... no ferrous material in the construction or it'll build up on the magnets until it hits something, and no pendulum designs, or none with conductive material due to magnetic braking.
It turns out the inherent mechanical limitations override the low friction advantages pretty much everywhere.
For practical engineering work most frictionless applications either need to handle 100+ HP to make economic sense, which isn't happening, or what they really need is sensing with no stick/slip friction and we have rather advanced and cheap optical position sensors and other non-contact sensors now a days.
in the youtube video below, they show shots of the hardware.
I don't know what the material is. My guess is they have a print head that will generate a real strong real small magnetic field, they walk the print head over the base material reversing the field in specific spots. that's what it looks like to me anyway.
The patent doc linked elsewhere in the thread talks about two coils with opposite fields being used at the same time; only took a cursory glance though.
does this mean supercheap maglev (hyperloop?) is nigh if we put some carefully designed Polymagnets patterns aligned on a track for near-zero power transportation?
No, but it does suggest that you could make patterned magnetic rails and riders such that you had a non-contact bearing surface. By patterning the rail and rider with gray codes you could insure that in all orientations they maintained some "push".
They would need a machine to pattern the rails though, and it would remain to be seen how durable such a bearing would be, especially if it got too warm.
You'd need a balancing trick besides just the magnets otherwise you'll end up with a positive feedback loop terminating in contact, but there are some interesting ways around this (that you can also 'roll out' to apply linearly):
All magnets will slowly demagnetize but it is so slow that no matter what your application you'll be fine as long as you don't repeatedly impact the magnet and you don't heat it above a certain temperature.
An array of, say p, individual magnets some aligned with N up and some with S up produces a field that can be designed to repel or attract a second array of , say q, magnets (having a possibly different arrangement). What is interesting is that since the forces between any two of the individual little magnets in the arrays drops off non-linearly (inversely proportional to the square of the distance) a computer can be used to layout the p magnets in one array and the q in the other so that the aggregate force between the two arrays (i.e. the sum of all the p*q forces between all of the magnets in the two array) is attractive at some distances or orientations of the two arrays and repulsive at other distances or orientations.
Imaging a simple linear arrangement of the two magnet arrays. If both look like N S N S N S N S then as the two arrangements slide past each other they will alternately repulse each other (i.e. N against N) and attract each other (N against S). This is just a simple illustration of the principle. Watch the video in the linked article from which this can be gathered and more.
An obvious application is self-aligning connectors. Magnetic connectors have been around for years, but, like Apple's discontinued magnetic charger plug, they usually have some mechanical alignment guides. A completely flat connector is now possible.
[1] http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1e2t6n_cmr-correlated-magn...