The Poor Man’s Segway

Skate Segway

Well, maybe it’s not entirely a Segway, but it’s the right idea. these ubc students went and drew up the plans for a skateboard based segway-like vehicle. they dubbed it “emanual” after the skateboard trick called the manual (come on, you at least played tony hawk for playstation right?). they awesome part is that it works. took a few years, but hey, good things take time. it uses electronic tilt sensors to keep you from falling over and has it’s own control system.

thanks [DBS]

18 thoughts on “The Poor Man’s Segway

  1. very cool. I live about an hour from UBC’s campus, actually.
    This project may be a ‘poor man’, but you still need a lot of electrical and engineering basics and knowledge to pull it off.
    it’s awesome how they pulled off the steering and balance.

  2. its really cool, but either some of these guys cant skate or its not balancing enough. Someone may get hurt riding this. anyway, they did a reallyu good effort, and I think girls will really dig this hack and they will get laid 1/100 times more than before but still 1/10000000000 less than Bam.

  3. This is totally awesome! I would definitely buy one of these if they weren’t too expensive. An obvious advantage of this ‘model’ over other homebrew segways is the lack of handlebars. It’s why a skateboard is more fun than a scooter…

    I wonder what they will do with those batteries that are in the backpack… (I didn’t have time to read the full article if they mentioned it)

  4. Hey, thanks for all those who emailed comments and questions on the board. Because of the interest I am in the process of redoing the webpage with a lot more description and more videos done with a different codec.

    There’s one mistake in your write-up. It didn’t take “a few years”, we actually started building on Jan 14th and had it running succesfully on Feb 8th. So “a few weeks” would be more accurate.

  5. hi justin, i emailed you a few times, thank you for deciding to write a how to, although now it looks like i’ll have to save the pages on my computer, because your sites been 509’d.

    make sure it’s complete enough so people could build one if they were so inclined, i noticed it looked like you made custom PCB’s for the controls (the protection mosfets) maybe you could put them up too, it would make this so much easier. if you emailed me the pics i could put them in a photo album from yahoo! since it gives me unlimited hosting, you could link them to save your bandwidth. unfortunately you cannot use [img] tags (i’ve tried everything) but you can just post a link to the entire album, and you can even add descriptions to each pic. email me if you are interested, AFAIK my reply email is still in your inbox, subject: “e-manual” (e and m are capitol).

    i’m sorry if i sound demanding when i ask for the files, more pics, etc. but the project has kinda got me **extremely** excited, and i mean no harm.

    ryan

  6. Making a segway out of a skateboard is pure genius. This article although its old is still pretty rad. I posted it up in the office today and had some very stimulating conversations with some others about the “segway” wannabe.

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