Electromagnetic Rail Launcher

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[integza]

"Aircraft Launcher", thats a freaking gun Tom, a cool gun though

[smartereveryday]

I love your channel so much. When I was a kid I tried to make a maglev track in my room. This makes me feel the same childlike wonder.

[doomyboi]

5:13 That look of betrayal, staring directly into the camera. That cheese stick trusted you.

[Nighthawkinlight]

Nice work on those slomo shots in this one

[PlasmaChannel]

Those jet sounds are fire, Tom. You’ve literally made a rail plane. Love it.

[bens]

You know this is how particle accelerators work? Like the large Hadron collider. The particles are attracted by large electromagnets which then switch to repel the particle away - arranged in a circle this allows the particle to be accelerated to some insane speeds, before they smash it into another particle really fast because why not 🤷‍♂️

[JoelCreates]

Tom: "Your turn little one"
Coil: "Are you winding me up?"

[acrylicmarlin]

Tom: "Aircraft Launcher"
Everyone else: "Railgun"

[mzw]

I would love to see more of the build and design and engineering process as opposed to the hot dog launching personally, though neither part can stand on its own. They are both important.

[GadgetAddict]

I'm glad I stayed untill the end. Seeing those planes being launched was awesome!

[Project-Air]

Just when I thought your videos couldn't get much better, you go ahead and weaponise a sausage

[patrickoconnor]

4:36

Tell me you're at a spar, without telling me you're at a spar

[joepie]

Always excellent videos. Bonus motion bee captured at 6:44 in the background, racing the plane at take off.

[kevinvermeer]

6:42 - Housefly bogey has entered our airspace, interceptor aircraft launched! It would be neat to see an LED on each coil (over the MOSFET output, ~5mA wouldn't matter to the coils) and/or on the Hall effect output. With the high-speed camera, you could see all the timing.

[FaZuQ]

You can shorten the rail by 2 times or leave it long (increase speed). By adding the function of changing polarity when the projectile leaves the coil

[siberx]

In addition to flipping the magnet polarity halfway through to increase the force applied by each magnet, you can also vary the timing between each sensor detection and the coil activation to improve the output.

Since the payload speed varies dramatically along the rail, the optimum delay between sled detection and coil activation will also vary. Conveniently, you can use the time difference between the previous two detections to get an estimate of the current velocity of the sled, so you can actually make this time offset dynamic relative to the mass of your payload with no additional hardware.

Some people commented to instead vary the spacing between each coil, but that's just wasting rail space and acceleration distance (not to mention the optimum spacing would vary with payload mass). You have such a good idea of the position and velocity of your sled with the sensor setup that keeping the coils closely packed and varying the timing will give better results.

Also note that as suggested by some others, optical sensors might be more tolerant to the substantial magnetic field you're dealing with in case you find you're getting spurious/early triggers due to the field from the previous coils going off, which might be a bigger problem once you're flipping the polarity.

[somebodyoutofgermany]

Military: Noooo, You can‘t just have a railgun at home.
Tom: Haha, Paperplane launcher goes

[revolution]

1:40 instead of turning it off you could reverse the positive and negative charges so that the polarity of the magnetic field is reversed and pushes the magnet away

[ruki]

I'm pretty sure that despite having a rail, this is technically a Gauss-gun or Coil-gun. The title of Coil aircraft launcher is correct. If you had connected a bar across two rails that had a current through them then you'd have a true "Rail-gun."

[murrayhorn]

Tom, put an Led next to (electrically accross) each coil. It would be cool to see them switch on in slow motion.