Electric Longboard - GoBoard

Over the thanksgiving weekend I sat down for a few hours and cranked out a rough electric longboard. And then I ordered $100 of parts. So maybe this will happen. We'll see. Everything was designed around a very simple deck and standard trucks and wheels from the interwebs. The only custom bits will be the motor mounts, whatever connects the pulleys to the wheels, and the battery enclosure. I may look around for a simple charge controller so I don't have to take the thing apart every time I want to charge it, but let's leave that for version 2.

From the side - modeled with a flat board.

The board was designed around a motor and batteries I already had. I don't totally remember but a top speed target of 20 seemed pretty reasonable and realistically I'll go about 15 anyway. Safety first?

Closeup of pulleys/tensioner. 7.5" belts is what SW came up with. 5:1 ratio 

Obligatory 'the top comes off' picture. Battery assembly will be 3D printed.

Hooray for efficient-yet-dangerous transportation

The Death of Dethscooter and The Life and Death of Schlongboard

March 3, 2012 marked the end of an era. Dethscooter got a taste of its own medicine, and for the safety of the general public, will never return to life.

The legend goes that a young knight was travelling from his quarters to his place of work on a warm saturday morning. Everything was normal until suddenly, in the middle of a large intersection, his mode of transport (called Dethscooter) ceased to move forward and made the most unpleasant of grinding noises. Bravely he dismounted and began to assess the failure, but he was unable to do so because a cloud of thick red smoke began to pour from the belly of his noble steed and made it impossible to see! Fearing that his Lithium Polymer battery had ruptured, our hero bravely went into the smoke and disconnected it from the main control board! Flames shot out of the beast, and a small thunderstorm formed in the space above the smoldering remains. When the battle was over, our knight was unharmed but was forced to progress to work on foot, dragging his deceased friend alongside him.

Inside the realm of 4-409, Dethscooter was disassembled to find that one row of FETs had shorted out and caused the electrical fire, which resulted in enough heat and/or current to desolder one of the motor leads. This was most likely caused by the massive amount of dirt and apparently electrically conductive grime that got in the electronics bay.

Smoldering remains.

Shouldn't that be connected?

Yeah, it should be connected.

60A fuse did its job!

Wall of Shame

Melted row of FETs

Now that Dethscooter was out of commission, our knight needed another form of transportation to get around his massive college campus. He settled for a skateboard he had owned since he was 12, and it would serve him well for one week. This period of happiness was cut short by a sudden urge to make his board better in one way or another. Our protagonist decided he wanted to increase the wheel size for a smoother ride and make the deck lower to the ground to make kicking easier. The project was called Schlongboard, or short-longboard.

The original 54mm skate wheels were swapped out for 72mm inline skate wheels, and the trucks were both moved to the slanted edges to allow for more flex in the board and a lower board height. Everything was going great: the ride was smooth, the friction was minimal, and the turning radius hadn't been severely affected. Then came The Jump Test. The knight jumped up and down on his board, and was satisfied with the springiness of it. He continued jumping to push its limits, and indeed they were pushed. A fatal blow to the middle of the board snapped it not-so-cleanly in two, and all was lost. No photos were taken before Schlongboard's demise.

Skateboards! Yeah!

Okay, NOW it's time to really get working on Name TBA scooter.