An electric skateboard looks like a motor, a battery, and a deck. In practice, it is a compact vehicle where mechanical packaging, power delivery, embedded software, and rider safety all affect one another. Treating those pieces as a single system became the central lesson of my research.
Start with measurable targets
I defined the project around performance that could be tested: speed, range, charging time, cost, and control reliability. The finished prototype reached 30 mph, traveled 13.45 miles at maximum speed, charged in about 1.5 hours, and used an $890 bill of materials.
- Falcon 500 brushless motor with integrated Talon FX control
- Raspberry Pi for high-level control and data processing
- HERO development board as a USB-to-CAN bridge
- ESP8266 wireless link for the phone-based remote
- Swappable DeWalt battery packs for practical charging and service
Safety belongs in the architecture
The safest behavior cannot be added at the end. The design combined a main breaker, overcurrent protection, an inertia cutoff, and a software deadman control. If the rider stopped actively commanding the board, the motor stopped receiving forward input.
Performance always has a cost
The prototype exceeded the comparison board’s top speed, but the additional power demand reduced range at maximum speed. That tradeoff made the project more useful: it replaced a vague goal of making a fast board with a real engineering question about how speed, energy, cost, and usability should be balanced.
Read the full research paper