What were you building in your junior year of highschool? Well, for [Aaron Cofield], he developed a motorized longboard.
He started with a ordinary longboard in the design he liked, provided it a nice paint coat (aesthetics over functionality people!) and then started looking into motorizing it. As it turns out there’s actually a pretty useful blog dedicated to converting longboards to electric. After many hours of research he settled on a 2400W RC prop motor and a 150A high performance RC automobile ESC unit. who knew it was that simple!
A few metal brackets, some belts, sprockets, an idler and a whole ton of lithium-ion batteries later and the build is complete! He’s currently controlling it with an RC automobile remote, but had plans to manage it using a Wii nunchuck and Arduino. The test runs this past summer got the board going about 20mph!
It looks done for now, but we’re sure he’s going to be continuing to refine it next summer — stick around after the break to see one of its first test drives!