Longboard Project

At the beginning of my senior year in high school, I decided that I would need a method of transportation when I was in college. With cars being so expensive, and with personal electric vehicles on the rise, I decided to build my own electric longboard. Electric longboards are not a new thing: many people in large cities have seen people commute on Boosted Boards since 2012. I had heard people rave about how effective electric skateboards are for personal short-range transportation. The issue with these electric skateboards is their cost: at $1500, these boards are out of reach for your average high school student.

The parameters of the project were simple: match or exceed the advertised specifications of of a boosted board for 20% of the cost. At the time Boosted listed their board for $1500, with a top speed of 22 MPH and a range of 7 miles. With such a small budget, I had to scrounge and source materials carefully. I used a scrap piece of plywood for the deck, cutting out my own design on a CNC router. I used the ESC from RC car, and a motor from an RC plane. Finally, I sourced some hobby grade lithum polymer batteries. Together these components gave me a top speed of 27 MPH, and a range of 9.7 miles. The total cost of this build came to $312.68.

Since this project turned out to be so much fun, this first build became a proof of concept for later longboards. I had built this board in just a couple days, and I wanted to refine what I had built. I spent the next couple months experimenting with various different shapes and sizes of decks. I found shorter decks to be much more ‘twitchy’ and unstable. Eventually I put the electronics into a