Do you remember those levitating lamps that were all the rage some years ago? Floating light bulbs, globes, you name it. After the initial craze of expensive desk toys, a wave of cheap kits became available from the usual suspects. [RobSmithDev] wanted to make a commemorative lamp for the Amiga’s 40th anniversary, but… it was missing something. Sure, the levitating red-and-white “boing” ball looked good, but in the famous demo, the ball is spinning at a jaunty angle. You can’t do that with mag-lev… not without a hack, anyway.

The hack [RobSmith] decided on is quite simple: the levitator is working in the usual manner, but rather than mount his “boing ball” directly to the magnet, the magnet is glued to a Dalek-lookalike plinth. The plinth holds a small motor, which is mounted at an angle to the base. Since the base stays vertical, the motor’s shaft provides the jaunty angle for the 3D-printed boing ball’s rotation. The motor is powered by the same coil that came with the kit to power the LEDs– indeed, the original LEDs are reused. An interesting twist is that the inductor alone was not able to provide enough power to run even the motor by itself: [Rob] had to add a capacitor to tune the LC circuit to the ~100 kHz frequency of the base coil. While needing to tune an antenna shouldn’t be any sort of surprise, neither we nor [Rob] were thinking of this as an antenna, so it was a neat detail to learn.

With the hard drive-inspired base — which eschews insets for self-tapping screws — the resulting lamp makes a lovely homage to the Amiga Computer in its 40th year.

We’ve seen these mag-lev modules before, but the effect is always mesmerizing.  Of course, if you want to skip the magnets, you can still pretend to levitate a lamp with tensegrity.