The Gauss Speedway Magnet Track
Description
The Gauss Speedway is a linear motor laid out on a PCB as a track, with an extra set of “guard rail” traces to help keep the magnet cars on the track as they are accelerated around the curves.
I talk more about the design in the Original Post about it. I also wrote a post about CurvyCad, the python tool I used for generating track layouts.
One of the cool things that can happen when you share a project on the internet, is that strangers around the world can pick it up and make something even better out of it. That’s exactly what the “Janky Jingle Crew” did.
Links
Other Videos
The First Prototype Track
A neat momentum transfer trick
If the driver commutation rate is too fast, the magnet car can’t accelerate to that speed, but sometimes it can find a nice stable equilibrium where it moves at a fraction of the speed. If you give it a little bump to accelerate it, it can resume the correct speed. In this case, one car bumps the other, speeding it up to the commutation speed, but it loses its own momentum and ends up stuck in slow mode, waiting for it’s own bump to come back around.
Car Magnet Installation
XY Magnet Motion Demo
You can use a similar concept for arbirtray XY motion, by using two layers of traces, arranged 90 degrees off from each other. I experimented with this some as well, but never really wrote about it.