WholeMagnetics

An ordinary magnet has two poles — one north, one south — and that is the whole story. A programmable magnet rewrites that story by printing many tiny regions of alternating polarity, in a deliberately designed pattern, onto a single piece of magnetic material.

Each of those tiny magnetized regions is called a maxel — a “magnetic pixel.” A specialized machine writes them one at a time, hundreds or thousands to a face, in whatever arrangement an engineer specifies. The technology was invented by Larry Fullerton and commercialized by Correlated Magnetics Research under the Polymagnet name.

Because the pattern is designed rather than uniform, the magnet's behavior is designed too. The same disc of material can be made to snap into precise alignment, to hold hard up close but release cleanly at a short distance, to spring, to latch, to resist sliding sideways, or to attach only to another magnet carrying the matching code.

Why it matters

Every one of those behaviors normally needs springs, detents, screws, or moving parts. A coded magnet can replace them with a single solid, sealed, wear-free component — no hinge to fail, nothing to lubricate. That is why programmable magnets keep turning up in consumer electronics, medical and dental devices, automotive and aerospace assemblies, robotics, and manufacturing fixtures.

Want the deeper engineering treatment? The independent coded-magnet knowledge network goes further: Multipole Magnets reviews what they do and who's using them, Multipole Mag is the definitive deep guide, Maxel explains the magnetic-pixel idea, and Coded Magnets is the plain-language entry point. To hold the real thing, order a demo kit from Polymagnet, or watch them in action on our video wall.