Eskate Project

Hey Everyone,

I’ve been messing around with electric skateboards recently and I’d like to show off my new board.
This was my first board: Electric Street Skate | Hackaday.io

This was rev1 of the board:

The specs at the time were:

  • 4x Ligo Batteries
  • 2000W dual hub motors (1000 watts each)
  • Ebay Dual electric speed controller and 2.4ghz remote.

The problem I was having with that setup was that it was drawing too much current for the batteries, and the batteries would cutout when accelerating at full throttle causing the board to surge making it unridable.

The problem was that each Ligo battery is rated to do 10Amp at 36v and the 2000 watt motors at 36v means it’s going to draw 55.55Amps, which is more than the 40amps the four ligo batteries can provide.

To see if I could combat the problem I found the largest capacitors I could find and strapped them on the board. This helped my surging problem but only a little bit and the board was still unrideable.

And unfortunately I could not configure the electric speed controllers to limit the amount of current.

Here is where Revision two comes in:

The specs for revision two are:

  • 8x Ligo Batteries
  • 2000W dual hub motors (1000 watts each)
  • 1x 2.4ghz 2ch reciever and remote
  • 2x Enertion FOCBOXes (aka Vesc-X)

This thing is really friggin’ fast. I had to dial it down by like 50% just to make it ridable.
It’s just slightly faster than a bicyclist when it comes to accelerating, and slightly faster when it comes to cruising speed. Unless there is an incline, then the board just screams past anyone on a bike.

With 8 ligo batteries each at 2.7Ah at 36v I’m looking at a total of 777.6Wh. Estimated range is about 40km.

The braking feels really good, and I’ll have datalogging via bluetooth once my bluetooth modules show up. The electric speed controllers are opensource and there is a lot of community support around them. We are even doing a group build on these here: [Group buy] vESC Open Source Brushless Motor Driver - #2 by Jarrett

I’m pretty content with how it rides right now. The next project is to make it more aesthetically pleasing.

12 Likes

If I was 17 instead of 57 I’d probably be all over a build like this.
Looks awesome.

5 Likes

Looks Cool, Great Engineering Feat!
This inspires me to get an ESC BLDC Driver!

Amazing! I’ve watched the progression of this build and have been blown away. Very inspiring. Thanks for posting the write up.

I wonder if that cpu isn’t a bit of overkill. It’s to run the FOC algorithm I believe. But the firmware as far as I have seen, doesn’t support sensorless operation. Maybe its just firmware to be written, or maybe a simple hw modification to support, but I can’t open the schematic files in eagle… $57 buck would be a bargain if it could be modified, but without cad files…
Thanks @toma for confirming that the vesc does actually work…

As far as I am aware it does support sensorless operation.

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