Electric Skateboard Build

All the craze in 2017 was building electric skateboards, and I was deep in that world. I was about to spend a semester working in Denmark, and I wanted to build myself a stylish, portable method of transportation.

The components were relatively simple, but the challenge was mounting them all neatly to the bottom of a skateboard.

The board consisted of:

A large RC airplane brushless outrunner motor, bolted to a custom bracket welded to the back truck. The wheel was belt-driven from a pinion on the motor to a 3D-printed gear mounted to the inside of the wheel.

The motor ran to an electronic speed controller, which I mounted inside a custom aluminum housing. I had machined this housing with fins for maximum heat dissipation from the speed controller. The controller was designed so you could easily tune the acceleration curve of the board, avoiding the jerky motions that many RC devices have.

From there, the speed controller cables ran to the battery box, which held four large 5200 mAh batteries. These were configured into two large 8S batteries in parallel, running through an 8S BMS.

The battery box had two cables sticking out of it: one for the charger and one with a small removable key connector that served as an ignition key.

All of this was controlled with a small RC receiver and a simple thumb joystick.

I finished the project just in time to take it to Denmark, where I’d go on eight-hour adventures, cruising through the city’s bike lanes. When I wanted to go inside a museum or restaurant, I could just pick up my board and carry it in.

This might be my favorite thing I’ve ever built—not only because it was one of my first real entries into electromechanical systems, but because it was so simple, reliable, and fun to ride. I had hundreds of hours of adventures on that thing.

The board ended up being so reliable that it has survived hundreds of miles of runtime—and it’s still kicking today.

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