Electromagnetic Links

Here are some Web resources I found useful while researching these projects. Please tell me if any links are broken! Also let me know if you know of anything additional that might be useful.

More Links

• Is a coilgun a "firearm?" Learn more at The Straight Dope
• How to Buy, Sell & Shoot in Every State provides useful home security and state legal requirements.
• Electronics for the Evil Genius is a rich source of beginning electronics for the independent learner. No previous knowlege required.
• Circuit Cellar On-line offers practical, hands-on applications and solutions for embedded-control designers.
• How Stuff Works: Electromagnet tells you the most basic principles of coils and magnets. Includes suggestions for experiments.
• Math Calculators is a great way to calculate and convert a wide variety of things. Area, angles, energy, force, power, pressure, speed, homework solutions, it's all in there.

Levitation

• Levitation Kit by Guy Marsden has a very clever one-chip design.
• Visual Levitation offers a terrific levitation system, and their kit is a reasonable price. Read my review.
• Diamagnetic Levitation shows you how it works, and sells supplies and kits to build your own.
• Flying Magnet has a complete levitate-from-below system in 3d, written in both French and English.
• Magnetic Levitation - Science is Fun contains the best links to every conceivable type of maglev device.

Coilguns

• Portable Coilgun is chapter 1 of '15 Dangerously Mad Projects for the Evil Genius' by Simon Monk. Download it. Build it. Best write-up ever!
• MadLabs Coilgun has an extremely nice 3-stage coilgun with optical sensors and capacitive discharge power.
• Me And My Monkey has lots of good coilgun (and other) design details and schematics.
• Jeff's Electromagnetic Coilgun has an interesting hand-held model.
• Slava Persion's Voltage Labs has an interesting variety of EM, projectile and radiation weapon projects.
• Sam Barros' Power Labs has a variety of high-energy experiments, including 3kJ and 7kJ coilguns.
• Lissandro's Mass Drivers has energy calculations along with thoughts on inductance and novel coil designs.
• Go to IBM Patent Search and look up Patent 5,763,812 for a "Compact Personal Rail Gun" filed in 1995. It is an educational introduction, if you can read through the legalese. His design detects the projectile position by measuring the inductance of the coil.

Gun Safety

• Teaching Kids Gun Safety an educational firearms blog edited by James Forrester that provides information to help people know how to safely use and store their guns.
• The Smart Parent's Guide to Gun Safety applies to coilguns as well as any other projectile weapon.
• Best Gun Safe Reviews keeps you current on safe storage of weapons.
• 5 Steps To Improve Gun Safety For Kids is a great infographic done by NationalBiometric.org to improve gun safety and reduce incidents involving children and teens due to the accidental discharge of a firearm.
• Practice your gun safety, starting in Boy Scouts, at Air Rifles Safety Information

Discussion Areas

• .HV Community has active discussions of high voltage and linear accelerator topics. This is where I hang out.

Parts

• Best PCB Design Tools in 2021 by WellPCB.com talks about the best PCB design software tools available in the market today, the evaluation criteria and why certain PCB design packages are recommended for your workflow. They study all my favorite packages and several more.
• EasyEDA offers free online tools for electronic circuit design and circuit simulation using Spice and PCB design and Gerber tools. Also offers great prices on custom PCB manufacturing.
• PCBWeb is a free CAD application for designing and manufacturing electronics hardware.
• MWS Wire provides all kinds of magnet wire, and has personally contacted me to say they are eager to sell small lots to hobbyists like us!
• WireTron manufactures wires for electromagnets and other applications. They offer a handy piece of free software to help understand and choose magnet wire. Get it!
• The general-purpose 2N2222 (or the plastic-case MPS2222, as Motorola produces it) is spec'd on the Fairchild site at: http://www.fairchildsemi.com/ds/PN/PN2222A.pdf
• Capacitor Testing and Safe Discharging by Samuel M. Goldwasser has a great deal of practical information about capacitors.
• Tribology: Rtec Instruments specializes in design and manufacturing of high tech instruments such as tribometers, 3d profilometer, stress tester and atomic force microscope etc.

Finite-Element Analysis Programs

• FEMM is a free package provided by Dr. David Meeker, and is an excellent choice for coilgun modelling.
• The FEMM Tutorial by David Meeker (based on Ian Stokes-Rees tutorial) is an essential introduction to using FEMM.
• QuickField by Tera Analysis does magnetic field plots for user-defined configurations. Highly graphical and relatively easy to set up 3d configurations. The student edition is a free 3MB download but the limit of 200 nodes will prevent you from solving real problems.
• Solenoid Physlet is a Java applet for a novel visualization of the magnetic field around a solenoid. This is part of the Web Physics pages by Davidson College.
• Field Precision creates 2D and 3D finite-element programs for electrostatics, magnet design, thermal transport, charged-particle devices, electromagnetic analysis and radiation transport in materials. The programs are moderately priced for consultants, universities and small companies.

Inductance Formulas

• Wheeler Formulas for Inductance provides equations for common coil configurations.