Nothing screams "future" more than stuff that levitates, and this levitating LED lightturns things up by adding wireless power to the mix as well. It's not something that you can buy quite yet, but soon, you'll be able to just build one for yourself at home.
As with most magical hovering tricks, this LED light is held in midair by a combination of regular magnets and electromagnets. There's also a separate pair of resonating coils to deliver the wireless power, meaning that you can switch the light off without killing the hovering capability. While it's not as efficient as a regular LED light, the guy who built this thing (Chris Rieger) says that while in operation the whole system only draws about nine watts, and three of those go to power the LED itself.
Now, you'd think that if your power went out, having all your lights immediately crash to the floor might be slightly annoying and slightly more dangerous, but Chris says that killing the power causes the lights to stick to the ceiling instead. What seems to be going on is that since there's a magnet in the light itself plus a big hunk of metal in the ceiling, the power-dependent electromagnetic field is actually managing a repelling force to keep the light balanced between the magnetic attraction and gravity, so when the power goes out, the magnets just do their normal magnet thing and stick to each other.
If there's enough interest (and there seems to be a lot of interest so far), Chris plans to make a small run of kits to let you set up something like this for yourself. We have no idea how much it'll cost, but things like this usually end up being either way way more or way way less than you think. See it in operation in the video below.
LevLight, via Hack a Day
As with most magical hovering tricks, this LED light is held in midair by a combination of regular magnets and electromagnets. There's also a separate pair of resonating coils to deliver the wireless power, meaning that you can switch the light off without killing the hovering capability. While it's not as efficient as a regular LED light, the guy who built this thing (Chris Rieger) says that while in operation the whole system only draws about nine watts, and three of those go to power the LED itself.
Now, you'd think that if your power went out, having all your lights immediately crash to the floor might be slightly annoying and slightly more dangerous, but Chris says that killing the power causes the lights to stick to the ceiling instead. What seems to be going on is that since there's a magnet in the light itself plus a big hunk of metal in the ceiling, the power-dependent electromagnetic field is actually managing a repelling force to keep the light balanced between the magnetic attraction and gravity, so when the power goes out, the magnets just do their normal magnet thing and stick to each other.
If there's enough interest (and there seems to be a lot of interest so far), Chris plans to make a small run of kits to let you set up something like this for yourself. We have no idea how much it'll cost, but things like this usually end up being either way way more or way way less than you think. See it in operation in the video below.
LevLight, via Hack a Day
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