Smartphone Controlled Electric Skateboard With Evive

This instructable will take your through the instructions to make your own powered skateboard, which you can make at your home or workshop. The skateboard will be motor-driven, smartphone controlled and with a 3-tier controllable speed. It also has body lights and headlights with controlled brightness level. And at last it will have a proximity/obstacle detecting sensor at it front to stop the skateboard, whenever and obstacle comes in its range.

To make the powered skateboard we will require following components:

Skateboard
evive
Bluetooth module HC-05
Motor driver
Motor
12 -Volt Battery
Proximity sensor
Lights
Android smartphone

Step 1: Mounting Motor on the Skateboard

We will mount the motor on the rear side of the skateboard and connect it to the rear wheel via chain and sprocket. You can buy two sprockets of size about two-third of the diameter of the wheel and chain from any garage shop. First we have to make a coupler for mounting the sprocket on the wheel. After making the coupler using lathe weld the sprocket and the coupler. Then, mount the coupler on the wheel using nut and bolts.

To make the motor mounting bracket, cut Aluminium sheet of appropriate size and drill all the mounting holes. Then bend the sheet in L-shape.

Drill the holes on the rear side of the skateboard and mount the motor brackets.

Then mount the motor. Using lathe make a coupler for mounting sprocket on shaft. Weld the coupler and the sprocket. Using chain connect the sprockets.

This way you can drive the skateboard using motor.

Step 2: Headlight

For the skateboard to work in the night, we have mounted a headlight on the front part. For that we have made a custom 3D printed part and using nuts and bolts, mount it on the skateboard. After that, take four LEDs and connect them in series and mount on the 3D printed part as shown in the figure

You can download the part from here.

Step 3: Obstacle Avoidance: Mounting Proximity Sensor

For obstacle avoidance application we have also added a proximity sensor.

The sensor is mounted on the same 3D printed part.

Step 4: Running the Motor Using Motor Library

We have built a new motor library having complex functions in a simple form. You can download it from here, note that the class name is "Motor".
In evive, we have two motor pins. As we have used only one motor for moving the skateboard, so we will use one motor pin in the motor of the skateboard.
We have used the other motor pin for controlling our lights (yes, its a hack).
Now, include the motor library and create two objects- one for the motor and the other for the lights.
The motor object requires three parameters while initializing- left pin, right pin and PWM pin. PWM pin sets the speed of the motor and varies between 0 and 255.
First, we have stopped the motor by using motor.stop() function which automatically locks the motor in the setup.
Then we start it smoothly in starting the skateboard using the function motor.startSmoothly (PWM) and now you can set the speed using motor.move(PWM) function giving parameter as your desired motor speed (255 for maximum, 0 to stop).
Similiarly this can be used to control the lights too.

Step 5: Using Smartphone for Control

We have used the Bluetooth module HC-05 which we also used in the Home automation (you can see its detail in our Home Automation instructable from here) . In this, we have used the controller mode of the app. where we have assigned the controllers the value which we have written in code. the value assigned are

'0' for startSmoothly
'f' for stopping the skateboard
'3' for forward motion and '1' for slowing down or going backward
'o' for increasing the brightness
'l' for decreasing the brightness

By using simple if/else statements in the code we have applied these controls in the skate.

You can view the code here.

You can download the Bluetooth controller app here.

Step 6: Adding Custom Brightness Headlights and Bodylights

We have added some good looking neon lights as shown in figure. and some big LED's of sufficient brightness. We have used the motor driver for this work. By setting different PWM for motor 2 that is attached to lights we can change the brigtness of the light.

Step 7: Coding for the Proximity Sensor

Now, we will add the proximity sensor.

The proximity sensor we used works at 12V DC so we cannot directly connect it to any Micro-controller. Either we can made a voltage divider, or some voltage regulator like 7805 IC. But since evive has voltage sensing in range of -30V to +30V, we have just plug in directly to ProbeV. It uses ADE7912 IC via SPI based communication.