Whoop, day one of working this is what I did yesterday on my skateboard.

8 HOURS (Using Journal.md)

So what is this project?

I wanted it to be a smart electric skateboard that used an ESP32 and
Arduino Nano to do the following features:

• Bluetooth control (ESP32)
• An app that connects to the board and lets you post your rides on
  Strava (the most important feature for me)
• GPS Datalogging
• Headlights
• Hall effect throttle
• Spark key that unlocks the entire system by completing the circuit
• OLED Screen
• Gyroscope

I wanted to do this project because I had a spare RC car motor and ESC lying around that I figured out how to use with a NiMH battery pack. I thought that if I tweaked the gear ratio enough I could get enough power out of a measly 9.6V battery to fully flesh out an electric skateboard…

Sadly I was wrong.In order to make a smart electric skateboard you first have to have an electric skateboard (duh). So I started out with the
deck.

I realized that I actually wanted to be able to bring this thing places so I chose a relatively small base deck which can just be upgraded to a better one need be. A $40 27 x 8 longboard deck. Nothing terribly remarkable but should have enough space for all my electronics. Next up, was the drive train kit, which is essentially the belt and pulley system that mounts a motor to the axle of the skateboard. I found a simple one on diyelectricskateboard.org (a little bit on the nose, you
think?) It comes with wheels, trucks, etc. etc.

You can see photos in my Journal.md btw (it’s basically this devlog but more thorough):
https://github.com/Fifthsol/Smart-Electric-Skateboard/blob/main/JOURNAL.md

As much as I’d love to buy the motor from the website I couldn’t find a good ESC-Motor combination for cheap, so I looked on flipsky and ended up finding a good motor ESC combo with the “Mini FSESC4.2 50A” VESC and
the “BLDC Belt Motor 6354 190KV” motor

I chose all of the other parts relatively quickly as a lot of them are just standard ESP32/Arduino components. This was stuff like the ESP32 kit, NEO6M GPS module, MPU-6050, SSD1306 OLED, on off switch, MicroSD module, buzzer, etc. etc.

Since the battery I chose is a 6S 22.2V 5000mAH lipo I had to use a voltage step down module and added a UBEC to make sure the voltage is properly regulated as it flows to the ESP32, Arduino Nano, and the headlights.

These headlights ended up also being a pain. I found a 7 inch set on Amazon that is usually used for cars, I thought wiring it would be easy turns out it isn’t because there isn’t a signal wire on it and only
voltage and ground.

This is where I introduce my excellently formatted wiring diagram below.

As you see I added a MOFSET gate pin to ensure that I could turn off and on the headlights. Additionally, I had to put a lot of effort in making sure everything shares a common ground and that the Arduino Nano
doesn’t fry the ESP32; the ESP32 accepts only 3.3V input from signal pins and the Nano outputs 5V. Same thing occured with the hall effect thumb trigger.

Tommorow, I plan on finalizing this wiring diagram in a software that isn’t google drawings so I can actually design the mounting board that will go on the skateboard.

THIS DEVLOG IS A CUT DOWN VERSION OF MY JOURNAL.MD ENTRY FOR YESTERDAY,
IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE PLEASE VISIT THE LINK TO IT

https://github.com/Fifthsol/Smart-Electric-Skateboard/blob/main/JOURNAL.md