Electric Longboard


Summary

This is the first main Mechatronics project that I made. I made this during the summer before my freshman year in college. The board I designed and made, while the electronics I sourced and put together. The board uses a 10S1p battery(37V nominal) and a 190kv 6374 3250W BLDC motor(about 4.4 Horsepower!). I got the idea to make this because I really liked to watch Casey Neistat, a famous Youtuber who makes vlogs, and he uses a boosted board all the time.

Building of the board

I began this project with a ton of research, mainly a forum called electric skateboard builders. From the information on that forum, I decided to go with sourcing my parts and building it myself. There were kits, but they didn't do what I wanted and were outside my budget. But, before any of the mechatronics can be done, I first have to have a board.

To accomplish this, I again read some forums and watched some youtube videos, and found out that it was pretty easy to make your own longboard out of plywood. So, I began by creating a design I wanted to cut out of the wood.The plywood, as it came, was not strong enough to carry my weight and to witstand the riding forces, so I had to double the thickness. I sourced some baltic birch plywood and all the weights that we had at home and laid down the plywood to laminate it. to laminate the plywood I added a lot of wood glue and layed one layer on top of the other, with all the weights I had at the house. Once the wood glue dried, I then cut out the design and drilled the holes needed for the trucks. I then put grip tape on and tested how it felt. It felt great! It was time for the next step.

To complete the next step I took all the parts, that I'd sourced, and started to wire them up. I came up with the wiring shown below. I had two 5s batteries in series to make a 10s battery pack, which went to a VESC. The VESC is an open-source BLDC motor driver, which allows for FOC motor control if your motor accepts it(which mine does). The benefits of FOC, Field oriented control, is that its quieter, more efficient, and allows better slow driving. The better slow driving works because since the motor controller knows how the motor windings and magnets are positioned it can turn adjacent coils on. The wiring I came up with also has a key of sorts, which was just an XT-90 connector that goes to itself so when it's not connected there wouldn't be a complete circuit. When that was all wired up all I had to work on was the creation of the controller.

To create the controller, I used a common RC car controller. I took it apart and got rid of the turning wheel as all I needed was the throttle trigger. I then found a 3d file for a case that fit the guts of the RC controller. An image of the completed controller can be seen below.