Hello, everyone, my name is Zach, and you're watching byte sized.
In this video, I'm going to wrap up the series
where I've been building a self balancing skateboard.
This project is something that I've been wanting to do for a while.
And I went down a rabbit hole.
If you have an idea like this, stop dreaming about it
and take that first step this week to get started on the project.
My goal with byte sized is to inspire you and give you the confidence
and knowledge to build those ideas that are floating around in your head.
I'm going to start out by going over some performance measurements, along
with a cost comparison between the version that I built and the retail version.
Then I'm going to talk about the tools that were required
and the amount of effort that it took me to build this from scratch.
I would definitely consider this board a very early prototype version.
This is not the final version, which is why I'm going
to talk a little bit about some of the improvements that I would like to make.
With this information I'm going to sum up my thoughts
and give you my final recommendation
on whether or not I feel like you should build one of your own.
Before I go into the comparison, let's talk about what's available commercially.
The Onewheel company offers two different sizes.
There's the Onewheel pint, which is smaller,
and then the Onewheel XR
which is a lot more comparable to the one that I've built here.
So for comparison sake, I'm going to take the performance characteristics
of the one that I built and compare it against the Onewheel XR.
So let's start with the hub motor here. The
Onewheel XR has a 750W hyperscore brushless DC motor.
I don't know what Hyperscore means.
I did some research and couldn't really figure out what they meant by that.
I think it's just a brand name.
The one that I've purchased here is an 800W brushless DC motor.
The only difference in specs that I can see is that this one
has a slightly smaller tire on it.
Next, let's talk about the battery on the Onewheel XR there is a 324Wh nickel
what is it called? A nickel metal nickel.
I wrote it down here. Nickel, manganese, cobalt oxide.
There we go. In the Onewheel XR there is a 324Wh
nickel manganese cobalt oxide battery.
In the version that I built I purchased a
960Wh lithium ion battery pack.
That's roughly three times the capacity of the Onewheel
XR which should translate to a much further range.
Next, I'm going to talk about the length of the Onewheel that I built.
That battery that was three times the capacity of the Onewheel XR,
that battery was much bigger and it drove the design much more
than I had anticipated and made it way bigger than I really wanted it to be,
especially in the length .
This one that I've built here is about thirty seven inches long,
which is seven inches longer than the Onewheel XR.
I knew that by purchasing that battery
that this would make it much bigger and bulkier.
And that was a design decision that I ended up going with.
I've got a scale here to measure the weight of the Onewheel
that I built, the Onewheel XR clocks in at about
27 pounds, while the one that I built is closer to 34 pounds.
That extra weight comes from that battery. That's three times the capacity.
A couple of the biggest comparisons
that I want to make between these two boards are the maximum speed
and the range, or in other words,
the distance that it can travel on one battery charge.
The Onewheel XR can travel up to 19 miles per hour.
And I've got mine limited to about 18 miles an hour,
which is way faster than I even want to go.
Usually I ride this thing around 12 miles per hour.
I'm still in the middle of collecting data on the range for the board that I built.
But my back of the envelope calculations estimate that the range
is between 40 and 60 miles on one charge.
Now I'll talk about some of the little extra
bells and whistles that the Onewheel XR has to offer
and see how it compares to the one that I've built here.
Both of these boards are built using brushless DC Motors,
and they have a motor controller that uses field oriented control or FOC
motor controls, which means you can do fancy things like regenerative braking.
That means that if you're riding down a hill,
it'll actually regenerate that energy and recharge your battery from it.
Both the Onewheel XR and the one that I've built here
do not require a remote to hold in your hand.
They also both have LEDs at each end.
I'm not sure about the Onewheel XR,
but these ones are individually addressable RGB LEDs.
That means that I can program cool little animations
and do a whole bunch of different color schemes. And finally,
both of these boards have the ability to be connected to a mobile app.
Using the VESC tool mobile app I can get all sorts of information about
the board and my speed and my motor usage, just like the Onewheel app.
Now I'm going to talk about the tools that we're required to build this board.
Now, I build a lot of things on this channel,
and I've collected a lot of tools and parts over the years,
which made it a lot easier to build something like this.
If you were starting from scratch
and you haven't ever built anything like this before,
you're obviously going to need to buy a lot of tools.
Some of the things that you're going to need to assemble
the electronics are things like a soldering iron,
a heat gun, a crimper for some of the connectors, et cetera.
I also used a lot of things like wire and heat shrink and that kind of stuff.
Then, of course, there's the 3D printer.
I used this a lot in this project to print enclosures and different parts
for the Onewheel.
In addition to the tools for the electronics,
as well as the 3D printer, you saw me use several shop tools.
In order to fabricate the aluminum tubing I used things like a miter saw,
a drill press, which you could get by with a drill if that's all you had,
as well as a deburring tool and some metal files and things like that.
You'll also need things like drill bits and a tap.
And then I also used a whole floor for that largest hole.
Again, if you make things, you'll probably already
have a lot of these things on hand.
One of the things that you saw me use repeatedly
while drilling through that aluminum square tubing was a step like this.
This was invaluable in this project.
This portion of the video is sponsored by Altium.
Altium Designer is a PCB design environment full of professional features.
It really does strike that perfect balance
between having professional features and being really easy to use.
One of the coolest features of this software is the Altium 365 cloud.
As long as you're logged into your Altium 365 workspace,
you can access, share and open your projects on the go.
This makes collaborating with others
and having them review your designs super easy.
If you're ready to take your PCB design to the next level,
I would highly recommend checking out Altium Designer.
Supporting sponsors like Altium is a great way to support this channel.
When you use the link in the description.
You can get a free trial of Altium Designer,
plus a 30% discount if you decide to purchase a license.
The Onewheel XR has had years of development
and lots of design iterations and has a whole team behind it.
This was my first attempt at making something like this.
So there are lots of things
that I would like to improve if I were to make future versions of this.
All of that being said,
one of the biggest things that I want to improve about this version,
and I've talked about it a lot, is the battery.
I have searched all over to find a smaller battery
with similar performance characteristics, and I just couldn't find one.
One of the biggest factors that drives the size of these batteries
are the 18650 lithium ion cells.
So the next step would be actually to build my own battery pack.
And I've even looked
into getting the tools like a spot welder and all the little nickel strips,
as well as the little plastic spacers to build my own lithium
ion battery packs that would fit a little bit better in this.
Another thing that I would change in the next version of this
is to make the footpads out of something like wood.
These 3D printed footpads were never really a permanent solution.
It was sort of a path of least resistance to get me up and riding.
Along those same lines
are the force sensitive resistors that I use to detect the rider's foot.
I tried to find bigger ones that would allow my foot to be in
different locations on this footpad and give me a little bit more variability
in where I placed my foot.
However, I could not find them.
And these sizes were really kind of the standard sizes.
They're pretty small. They're about two inches by two inches.
And I have two of them placed kind of across the width of the footpad.
And that's really not ideal, because I really have to have
my foot squarely in that position in order for this to work.
If it moves anywhere else it goes to a fault in the board stops.
So in future versions, I would try to find or make my own force
sensitive resistor that would cover
a bigger section of the footpad, making it a lot easier to ride.
I would also change the material I use to 3D print a lot of these parts.
I have a lot of PLA on hand so that's what I ended up using.
I know that it's not the best material.
It really does not do well in heat.
And right now, I'm living in Arizona and it did not stand a chance
against the Arizona heat.
Parts started to warp
and so definitely in the future, I would use something like PETG
or maybe even ABS to print all of these parts that would be a lot
better in in the different environments that I'll be riding in.
Now it's time to talk about the cost of this build.
I know that's the part that you're probably most interested in.
If you compare against the Onewheel XR, you can go on to their website
and buy the most basic version of the Onewheel XR for about $1900.
And that's just the base price.
Beyond that, you can add
all these little extra things that make the price go up significantly.
Now, I built this thing as a prototype, which means that there's
a lot of initial costs and things that I
end up paying more for to get things quicker and that kind of stuff.
But I've spent a lot of time working on a bill of materials,
going through piece by piece and finding different vendors for things
to try to get the costs down.
And I have calculated that if I were to do this again, that it would cost about
$663 to build this version.
So that was one of the big motivations to building this project,
was that I didn't have $2000 to spend on a self balancing skateboard.
Finally, I'm going to talk about my final thoughts
and my recommendation on whether or not I think you should build one.
If you want a Onewheel
and you have never built anything like this before,
you don't have any of these skills
and you're not interested in learning these skills,
I would definitely recommend that you do not build one of these things.
You should definitely just go buy one.
There was a lot of effort
and a lot of time and a lot of researching and problem
solving that went into building this thing.
So if that's not something that you enjoy, don't do it.
However, if you're like me and you do like the problem solving
and you do like the engineering design process and you do like troubleshooting,
and you have these skills
and you have some of these tools that you've seen here,
this is something that I would definitely recommend taking on.
Like I said, this took a lot of effort.
And in order to recoup some of that time, I'm going to be offering this build guide
and the bill of materials and everything you need to build your own on my website.
I'm not going to charge a ton of money.
It's just a little bit to help me recoup that cost.
And it's also a great way to help me do projects like this.
It's a lot easier to justify doing projects like this when I can recuperate
some of that time by selling some of these plans and build guides.
So if you're interested in that, I've got more information down in the description.
I'll have a build article on my website
and a place where you can purchase the build guide.
Hopefully this project showed you
how to take complex ideas and break them down into more manageable pieces.
If you enjoy watching content like this,
I have a couple more videos here at the end that I recommend you watch.
You should also subscribe to byte sized and consider becoming
a supporting member either through Patreon or YouTube memberships.
When you become a byte supporting member, you get access to things like
early release videos, behind the scenes content and other stuff like that.
I also recently set up a discord
where I get to connect with you guys on a more personal level.
Thanks for taking the time to watch this video,
and I look forward to seeing you next time.