Cornell Maker Club Electric Skateboard

So first we have the parts, all of them will be linked in the description. We have the batteries, the motor, the speed control, the anti-spark plug, the wheels, the trucks, the gears, the belt, the transmitter, and receiver. So we're going to jump straight to electronics here and we're going to be hooking up the two batteries in series to the speed control. The speed control will receive a signal from the receiver and transmit that into the motor. So to start the build we're going to take our two 5000 mAh batteries and cut the red end off one and the black end off the other and go ahead and strip those wires. After they're stripped we can go ahead and solder them to our anti-spark plug for safety. And we're going to do the same exact thing with the two battery ends on the speed control. So after the solder job is done we're going to focus on the motor and start attaching the gear to the motor. So once the gear is securely screwed into place we can go ahead and start wiring our motor up to the speed control. In this case we're using a brushless motor which is nice because it doesn't actually matter where the wires go. To switch the direction of the motor you can actually just unsolder and re-solder any of the two wires back together. Now the final piece of our electronics portion of the build is actually binding the receiver and transmitter together. This is done by putting a bind pin in the fourth row of the receiver and our signal into the second pin. So we want to go ahead and plug everything together and turn our entire system on. After this we can make sure our system works and connect our transmitter and receiver to one another. As we can see this blue light is flashing and if we just hold our pair button on our transmitter they should be connected. So here's our first test and we can see the motor is running and we can brake and accelerate using the remote. So now that our electronics are done we can focus on the trucks and the wheels. So we have our other gear in place and we can mount our motor mount to our trucks using the three screws that was provided in the kit. Now this part's really important because you want to ensure that your motor has enough tension to pull the belt that will turn your wheel. So after screwing everything into place and securing the wheel to the trucks we decided to have our first go with the mechanical portions. Oh my god it's beating us look at this that is intense. So after figuring out the gears the belt and the trucks I went ahead and disassembled my old skateboard. So I went ahead and threw on the new trucks and the motor and the next problem I had to figure out was how I wanted to enclose all my electronics under the board. I went ahead and used a old pencil box and spray painted it red and I measured out where I was going to place all my electronic components. So after measuring out where I wanted my holes I went ahead and drilled two holes for my pencil box to hinge on. The last step before attaching my enclosure to the bottom of my board was to dremel out some openings for the batteries and motor to connect down. I then used some industrial grade velcro to secure the batteries the speed control and the transmitter all to the board before finally screwing on the hinge. Afterwards I gave my board a small stress test to see if the motor hit the ground. Everything was good so I was ready to test.