Gizmos & Gadgets: More and More Hoverboards – Holy Marty McFly

September 17, 2015

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September 17, 2015 – After reading a previous guest blogger’s posting on disruptive technologies coming to the market, Anthony Hall, a grandfather and professed geek, wrote me about Arx Pax, the developers of the Hendo Hoverboard. Anthony, seen below, has a grandson and granddaughter who are inspiring him to get involved in education. His particular interest, developing innovative games to nurture the next generation of scientists, engineers and application developers particularly in the Developing World. For this purpose he launched The Rose of Education (TREO) for this purpose, a for profit educational application development company. In this posting Anthony shares his love of invention.

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Of Hoverboards, Hoverboard Games and Hoverboards in Space

From Icarus to Iron Man 3, Flying has been the fancy and fantasy of humanity since the dawn of time. A passion and pursuit of Leonardo di Vinci, the dream of human powered flight just got a ‘lift’ from the folks at Arx Pax. The developers of the Hendo Hoverboard ran a successful KickStarter campaign last year raising more than $500,000 U.S. to support continued development of the company’s Magnetic Field Architecture (MFA). MFA is simply the design of more useful magnetic fields. By combining relatively weak magnetic fields in the correct way, the magnetic flux can be organized to reinforce and align itself to do more work. Depending on the application, MFA can begin either with electromagnets or permanent magnets. When their respective fields are properly combined, new field patterns can be created for specific uses.

The MFA hover engine generates a primary magnetic field, which induces electrical currents in the conductive surface. These eddy currents then create a secondary magnetic field which repels the primary field. In other words, the hover engines create opposing electromagnets in the surface material which provides lift.

But the Founders of the company, Greg and Jill Henderson, have bigger dreams than just skateboarding on air like Marty McFly in Back to the Future II. “Imagine if an earthquake hit, but before its tremors started shaking the buildings, the structures suddenly begin hovering, no longer touching the ground.”

The technology has far reaching potential. NASA has come on board, teaming up with Arx Pax to develop hover engines for space. States Arx Pax CEO, Greg Henderson, “Hover engines have applications in space, in transportation, in industrial automation, in structural isolation. NASA, by their nature, has to innovate to solve the problems they solve. And they get it.”

NASA is exploring how to use MFA for cubesats that could then fly in controlled formation forming distributed satellite systems capable of pinpointing and tracking objects both in space and on Earth with much greater precision. The technology could also be deployed for locating and collecting space debris, a growing problem for near-Earth orbit satellites and the International Space Station.

My own organization, TREO, plans to integrate the Arx Pax hover engine into a gaming platform, the Dragon’s EGG Hoverboard, currently in development.

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