I am trying to make an Arduino based electric skateboard through my engineering program at school. At the moment, I have a skateboard with 68.25 mm wheels. I am using one NEO Brushless motor to drive one wheel of the skateboard, with a REV ESC, and I am powering it with 2 12v batteries, 24v total. I planned to use a pulley system to have the motor driving the wheel, with a 3:1 ratio for the pulley. However, the motor’s RPM (around 10,000 rpm) is too high for the speed that I want my board to achieve (15 mph), and there is no gear ratio that will accommodate both the motor and the board’s size. What motor should I switch to in order to maximize speed while still keeping the gear ratio small enough to fit on the board?
Yo Drew, Welcome to the forum!
The forum tends to be more focused on First robotics rather than e-skate projects but that does not mean you can not use the great calculators that exist for Robot drivetrains for your electric skateboard. I would look at some of those.
Here is a great reasourse to get started with E-skate
Here are some of the robot drivetrain calculators:
Also
You may be better served looking for a dedicated electric skateboard calculator.
Here is a simple and popular one:
http://calc.esk8.it/
https://norde.cc/calculator.php
The electric-skateboard.builders is a great forum if you want to keep doing E-skate!
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1, look into multi-stage gear ratios, planetary systems, strain wave, cycloidal systems, etc. There are gear systems beyond just a small gear and a big gear and that’s all, and those systems are almost all designed to get higher reductions in smaller spaces.
B. make sure one neo is enough to push the weight you want to. I’ve always had trouble figuring the actual math behind this one, hopefully someone else can help here
iii. one powered wheel on a 4 wheeled system sounds very unbalanced. imagine if you had a car where the engine only turned one wheel, it would be really inefficient and difficult to run. I would suggest putting an axle connecting 2 wheels, and driving that. essentially creating a 2wd system.
I have built an electric longboard myself. You don’t actually need an arduino. Most of the remotes you can buy come with a little adapter that plugs directly into a motor controller. The hardest part for me was building the wheel and motor mount and then encasing the electronics and batteries. As far as the electronic layout it was super straight forward and plug and play. No programming required.
1 other note I forgot to to mention. I didn’t use a neo but I did use a brushless motor
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Some other great calculators I missed on my first pass. I would call these 2nd gen calculators:
Chief Link: ReCalc - An online mechanical design calculator with shareable URLs
What it was based on: AMB Robotics Calculator
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