Polymagnets

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.

>like Apple's discontinued magnetic charger plug

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.

This was originally posted as a link to the Smarter Every Day video a few hours ago. Policies...

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.

Remember that engineering might not move as fast software development.

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.

Printing seems too slow for the mass market.

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

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.

That is so cool. I can only imagine what awesome things people will use this for.

It's hard to even imagine how many different places you could apply this technology in. My mind is blown.

So how long until these lose strength, or worse, the patterning altogether?

especially:

https://youtu.be/IANBoybVApQ?t=5m46s

and

https://youtu.be/IANBoybVApQ?t=6m28s

I want one just as a desk toy.

Since I can't edit the comment above anymore;

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.

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.

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.

No, you can't - Earnshaw's theorem

The layout was nice to watch all 4 muted videos at once though.

First thing I thought of, too! If it helps, 'Empties' were renamed 'Springs' in the game STALKER.

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.

Typo on Original Assignee? "Correlated Megnetics Research, Llc."

HDD's / Tape ect may actually qualify as prior art. So, the patent is probably not that broad.

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.

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.

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.

There's a whole page of potential applications:

http://www.polymagnet.com/applications/

robotics

Frictionless gears? That'd be pretty handy on a trying-to-be-quiet nuclear submarine.

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.

If not, Tesla probably will.

That would be electropermanent magnets

At the very least, hard drive platters exhibit no discernible macroscopic magnetic force, i.e. put a piece of metal on one and it won't even twitch.

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.

Many years, and yes.

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.

most subtle Insane Clown Posse joke ever.