Home-made transportation is a thriving area for makers to flex their skills. Looking to shorten their university commute, [doublecloverleaf] modded his penny board by adding a motor that can have him zipping along at 40 Km/h!
The electric motor is mounted to the rear truck and delivers power to the wheel gear using a HTD 5 m pulley belt. Finding the deck too flexible to mount the battery pack under, [doublecloverleaf] strengthened it with a pair of carbon-fiber tubes bracketed on the underside. A few custom PCB boards connect ten 5 Ah LiPo battery cells in series to create two, five-cell packs which are kept safe by a thick housing mounted between the board’s trucks. [doublecloverleaf] calculates that they could make up to a 15 km trip on a single charge.
Thinking ahead, [doublecloverleaf] opted to use a DB25 port for charging — 9 pins for voltage balancing between cells within each battery, and ten more (five positive, five negative, in parallel) for charging at 5 A. A USB port allows him to tweak the VESC motor controller — this adds, among other useful features, regenerative braking!
A slightly modified RC car remote controls the motor — simply pull on the trigger to accelerate, and push to reverse and engage the regenerative breaking. It’s currently set to 80% of the motor’s max RPM at 40 A to preserve both the board and the rider’s health. Any faster, and they’d have to think about challenging the land speed record for electric skateboards.
Filed under: transportation hacks
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