Mjolnir, known as Thor’s hammer, is no longer exclusive in the Marvel comics as it already has its real-life counterpart. Yup, there’s a Mjolnir that cannot be simply lifted off the ground and there’s some engineering involved.
Allen Pan. Source: YouTube
It is electrical engineer Allen Pan, famous for Sufficiently Advanced on YouTube, who made his own version of the famous hammer that uses strong magnets – strong enough to make the hammer immoveable. He packed a microwave oven transformer electromagnet that uses electricity to produce a magnetic field. This is then put in the hammer, which creates a strong magnetic pull when placed on a metal surface such as a locked manhole cover.
Source: YouTube
The system works with a capacitive touch sensor handle, attached to an Arduino Pro Mini and a solid state relay, which serves as a switch. The electromagnets ‘activate’ and holds on to the metal surface when someone grabs the handle.
Here’s the catch: the hammer can only be lifted by a fingerprint sensor with Pan’s thumbprint as key. Nobody can ever lift the hammer on its metal surface as long as its engineer never switches it off by his thumbprint.
Pan just wishes he could be Thor, though, as he already has the hammer.
