Motorized Longboard

What were you building in your junior year of highschool? Well, for [Aaron Cofield], he built a motorized longboard. He started with a plain longboard in the design he liked, gave 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 handy 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 car 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 car remote, but had plans to control 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!

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Shopping Trolley is Wired for Camp

[James] needed some cool transportation for the upcoming Easter Camp in New Zealand, so he created a custom motorized shopping trolley that is sure to turn heads. The base of this project is a standard mobility scooter, which conveniently has a modular design. All of the electronics have connectors for quick service and the entire rear axle and motor assembly pop off with the pull of a lever.

[James] had to do a bit of welding and chassis rework to achieve his goal of mounting a shopping cart top to the scooter’s frame. Once finished, though, the setup looked great. It was actually comfortable to sit in, as [James] made a cutout for the driver’s feet to pass through. The real fun came with the electronics. The trolley is the most wired mobility scooter mod we’ve ever seen.

Most of the electronics are contained in a project box under the seat, with several Arduinos that control the various systems: interfacing with the original scooter electronics, a GPS receiver, and a GSM radio. [James] also went as far as to add RGB LED headlights, a horn, and a multi-tone siren from Jaycar.

Driving the trolley is simple. An arcade joystick selects the speed, and the scooter’s standard hand controls are used for forward, reverse, and steering. One of the more interesting mods [James] made was a custom Windows app to control the trolley via a USB radio module. The entire system can be secured, with the security code stored in NVRAM to prevent a power cycle from unlocking the system. [James] can even command the trolley to go forward or reverse from his touch screen. We’d love to see him add a steering servo to make it a completely remote-controlled solution, though this step would require some sort of clutch for manual control.

The final design works very well.  [James] may not win any drag races by keeping scooter’s original speed controls and associated electronics, but he did extend the range with larger batteries, so we’re sure the trolley will be a hit all over the camp. Similar projects have been built using the base of an electric wheelchair. If you have one that you want to control without invasive changes to the hardware, check out this accessibility hack which interfaces using a connector.

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Bally’s Bomber – A 1/3rd Replica of a B-17G

One of our tipsters just sent us this fascinating story about The Bally Bomber, a single man’s huge undertaking that started back in 1999. It’s a 1/3rd scale version of the B-17G Bomber — and no, it’s not remote controlled, there will be a pilot.

Not familiar with the B-17G? What about its trade name? It’s called the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. This massive bomber was developed back in the 1930′s for the United States Army Air Corps as a combination between the Boeing 247 transport plane and the experimental Boeing XB-15 Bomber. 8680 of the B-17G model were built, but as of September 2011, only 13 of the entire B-17 family remain airworthy. The Bally Bomber is the only known scale replica, and looking through the progress photos it is an absolutely jaw-dropping project. It hasn’t been test flown yet, but they are getting painfully close to its maiden flight.

For more information, you can also check out their Facebook page which seems to be updated on a regular basis.
[Thanks Ryan!]

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An Awesome Electric Bike

Converting a motorcycle to electric is always a favorite project of ours, and [Peter]‘s build is up there with the rest of them. The bike is a 2002 ZX6E he bought from a salvage shop. It had been parted out over the years and for $250 this very light aluminum frame made the for the perfect electric conversion frame. After learning MIG welding from his brother, [Peter] cut up a few plates and built a motor mount for his new 4.2 kW power plant.

The controller is a 300 amp IGBT he found on eBay, with an extraordinarily sturdy looking circuit built into an ammo box. The motor from the bike was replaced with 16 60Ah LiFe cells providing 52 volts. [Peter] also built his own battery management system using a Cypress PSoC 3 microcontroller and a beautiful custom PCB.
It’s still a long way from being finished, but already [Peter] has a great looking bike and an awesome weekend project on his hands.

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