Electric vehicles are everywhere now. Even though battery technology hasn’t had the breakthrough that we need to get everyone out driving an electric car, the price for batteries has dropped enough that almost anything else is possible. The hoverboard was proof of this: an inexpensive electric vehicle of sorts that anyone who was anyone in 2015 had. Taking his cue from there, [Harris] used off-the-shelf parts normally used for hoverboards to build his own battery-powered trike.
The trike is homemade from the ground up, too. The H-frame was bolted together using steel and lots and lots of bolts. Propulsion comes from a set of hub motors that are integrated into the wheels like a hoverboard or electric bicycle would have. Commonly available plug-and-play lithium batteries make up the power unit and are notably small. In fact, the entire build looks like little more than a frame and a seat, thanks to the inconspicuous batteries and hub motors.
Steering is accomplished by spinning the wheels at different rates, similar to how a tracked vehicle like a tank would steer. Each battery controls one of the drive wheels, and are both connected to a homemade controller. Be sure to check out the video below which shows him riding it all around his neighborhood at a respectable speed for a vehicle built out of hoverboard parts. Plans for an improved electric trike include switching out the front wheel for caster wheels which would be easier to steer.
If you need to scratch that electric vehicle itch, an electric longboard isn’t a bad idea but you could also modify hoverboards in other interesting ways.
Sorry, taking parts from one vehicle to build another doesn’t count as scratch built with me. Frame might be scratch built, doesn’t make the whole thing scratch built.
I think it was more about the scratch of an itch. Not so much that mysterious substance called “scratch” that things are built from when they’re built from bare elements. For example there aren’t really scratch built computers in that sense anymore, you just assemble them from prebuilt components. (Scratching an itch is often why people do that anymore these days.)
I guess that’s true. I’d kind of tend towards defining it as building from the smallest commodity components. A computer you make or order the bare PCB for and populate with components I’d call scratch built, one you use populated PCBs to slot together, I wouldn’t.
Most of us in the model building world would call this a “kit bash” which means you create something new using bits and parts from something else. Bashing together two kits to make something new.
Yeah, you have to mine your own ore with tools you built from items collected from the forest floor, build a foundry from earthen clay, start a fire with the friction of a bow and string (designed and built by you of course), smelt some crude medal to begin the process of building hand tools, all of which must be invented independently from any tools in known existence. You then drudge through each phase of human achievement from the stone age to the modern era all while refusing to take advantage of anything built or learned by other humans before your “Scratch Built” attempt. Stupid casuals. Why even put this “Hack” on the website.
Hmmm… I like it. Reminds me of a very strange French contraption from the Seventies (I have significant interest in weird 3-wheel vehicles) called the La Voiture Electronique Porquerolles. (GIS –> https://www.google.com/search?q=voiture+porquerolles&tbm=isch) It was operated with a joystick of some sort, and had a similar arrangement — two independently powered wheels in the rear, and a large caster-type getup up front. Of course it was bigger, being a two-seater, but the overall arrangement was largely the same.
I can’t imagine either one being actually road-legal in the US (a pity — I’d love to drive a Porquerolles, it looks like it’d be quite the experience…) but there you go.
You’d be surprised what they used to get away with… or not….
http://ijl.fi/amerikkalaista_tekniikkaa/MIHighwayKart.pdf
Oh my… how times have changed…
Sad truth: I live in a state where you have to have title, registration, and insurance to drive a /moped/. Hey Gov McCrory — some people just want a ride to the local Wal*Mart, a mile and a half down the highway. I don’t drink standing still, so why penalize /me/ for people who drink and drive? Sure, that’s a real problem — I’m not sayin’ it ain’t — but I am saying it strikes me as more than a little unfair to just broad-brush away a whole group of people as deadbeats ‘n’ law-dodgers when it’s just not true.
For the record… I can’t afford a car, for the same reason I can now not afford a moped — I’m disabled, and my token pittance from Uncle Sam ain’t enough for an insurance bill, not if I still want to eat and have medication. I could probably save up enough for a moped (a car is /way/ out of reach)… but I can’t pay insurance, so I guess it doesn’t freaking matter.
You could sell your computer.
That’s a bit of a condescending remark to someone who is likely worse of than you.
Sell yours and buy a clue.
I post on here from various machines scattered throughout my lair, one of which I bought for less than a very short cab ride, another, the price wouldn’t have got you to the next city over. So I don’t even think there’s any logic in suggesting that a person would have many hundreds of dollars unnecessarily tied up in a computer to be able to post on here.
Oh wow that french voiture porquerolles looks like a 2-person Sinclair C5, but without the wind deflector!
Too True. (EEV Blog C5 Video link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS6q27VOTOk )
Now that is a pretty amazing headline. When Star Wars first came out it would have fit in the fiction just fine. Scratch Built from Hoverboards. (Granted, they are not really hoverboards in the SciFi sense, but let me just ponder that title for a while…….)