Greg and Jill Henderson have developed hover technology that they expect will lead to hoverboards and other hover breakthroughs. They're currently running a Kickstarter funding campaign to raise funds for the project.
Working to solve the problem of lift, they say, allowed them some breakthroughs in the areas of propulsion and control. This first prototype is the Hendo proof of concept, and seeing the system in action is incredible.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/142464853/hendo-hoverboards-worlds-first-real-hoverboard
The prototype shown in the video is Hendo's eighteenth iteration. Four hover engines create a magnetic field that pushes against itself and generate the lift force. The working surface is currently required to be a non-ferromagnetic conductor.
Earnshaw's theorem is discussed as the standard constraint for magnetic levitation - a charged particle cannot be held in a stable equilibrium by electrostatic forces alone. But Lenz's Law and its ideas about current generation and flow is the way that the team gets around previous constraints.
Hover technology isn't just cool to watch, it's useful in several different applications. The Kickstarter campaign is offering developer kits that include The Whitebox, the same technology in a smaller package.
Whiteboxes are 10 x 10 x 5 inches, and hover off the ground between a half and a quarter inch instead of the hoverboard's one inch height. An app allows you to control the boxes and move them around a surface. The campaign page says that a static start is possible, so the boxes can be placed under an object and pop up from a standstill before moving away.
The campaign has already blown by its $250,000 fundraising goal with forty nine days left as of this writing. The page explains where the funds will go - manufacturing, research and development, lab space, new engineers and the construction of a hover park.
A timeline shows the events between this campaign window and the Hover Event. October 21, 2015 will see a massive media blitz that introduces the Hendo to the rest of the world.
The technology demonstrated in this video and on the company's website is incredible. It's great to see the developer kit being offered so that an open source army can also work on the problem of levitation and bringing the innovation to the fields of transportation and manufacturing. There's massive risk involved but this is a project we should all hope succeeds.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/142464853/hendo-hoverboards-worlds-first-real-hoverboard