Extreme Sport E-board Project

Thanks for your feedback guys!

Battery setup will be finalized in the next revision after Kickstarter. There’s plenty of room to play with between the rider’s feet. Right now we are just strapping them on as temporary measure.

Price point will definitely be outside of skateboards, but well within the range of mountainbikes and ATVs. We are tackling the project from an action sports side, not the commuting side, so the targeted crowd may well be slightly different. Our aim is to make the first e-board that is designed for the jumps that you see in snowboarding / mountain biking vids :smiley:

Looks great. Some questions:

How does it hold up in a crash? The exposed suspension looks great but does it need protection?

What sort of motor wattage and battery do you use? What’s the expected battery life before recharging?

Will there be a ‘gravity’ version available (no motor), or is this not what you are aiming for?


Jetpacks, drift bikes, electric skateboards- you have a charmed life and I am jealous.

We’re actually debating a non-motorized version internally. We’ve got the blueprint for it, but it’s a debate of whether the handling would be improved enough (or at all) to warrant any cost differences. We initially designed the suspension deliberately for a powered model.

We haven’t finalized batteries for our “Gen2” yet, but for our first test model (Gen1), we used 22V ~6ah batteries, and cruised for about 2 hrs without needing recharge. Motors are 3kW each. We didn’t test aggressive riding at that stage, but we calculated that it would’ve probably been half an hr. In Gen2, we’ll definitely increase battery capacity.

We’ve prepped a little poster that you can check out here: http://i44.tinypic.com/2wmjhnc.jpg that will explain a few more things.

Being a skateboarder myself there a few things that comes up when I look at this project :

Extreme and electric don’t go really well together : What is the intended use of this device? What kind of terrain was it designed for?

I wouldn’t want to break the battery on this thing so my guess is that it’s probably going to be more like a longboard/cruiser. Is the battery impact resistant?

First I want to do when I look at this thing is try a dirt jump with it. However, the foot straps don’t look very secure and appear to be made out of plastic. Wouldn’t these deform easily if you try to bring the skateboard up with you as you jump? Most dirt skateboards use more traditional straps or metal foot straps.

I would love to see the trucks in action as you carve since it looks like a pretty unique mechanism.

Overall I like the rugged/mechanical aesthetic of the item.

I like what you have going on. It definitely speaks to the ruggedness of the product. I just wonder a lot about final cost. Just a quick look makes me think this is going to be over $1000 for it. Which you have indicated is true. I am sure you will find buyers. But it seems like a lot to drop on a board. How are you going to deal with the maintenance issue? Because it will come quick people are going to break things or the suspension will need service of some kind. With the other products you mentioned like mountain bikes or ATVs you have places you can take those to. Just a quick concern I had when looking at the product. It looks great and hopefully one day I will get a chance to ride one.

Cheers VanDeBar. To answer your questions:

  1. Think of the intend use as snowboarding on dirt (or simply mountainboarding), except without the need for slopes. We started the project because where we live in Australia, we don’t get good snow, and we are half a day drive away from the nearest decent slopes.
  2. Battery will be on the deck, between the rider’s feet. We wouldn’t want debris to chip away at any batteries underneath the board.
  3. Engineered plastics can be as strong as steel, and can offer great flex. We chose open bindings for our demo model so that we can bail easily if things look tricky. But eventually, we’ll probably offer the option to have tradition mountainboard bindings too.

That is a great question, and something we are working on.
If our Kickstarter succeeds, we’ll look for dealers around the world, who could also be trained to maintain the board. Ironically, mountain bike dealers would probably be better suited for this than traditional skate shops, given their familiarity with shocks and carbon fibre.
Will also likely do a series of demo videos showing how to fix things on the board for anyone keen to do a bit of self-maintenance.

As an ex-RC guy, with a serious history of off road racing—kudos to you guys making a 1/8th electric buggy I can ride. Very cool.

The prototype looks very cool, but does indeed look like just a prototype and that you guys could use some design help. Both in skinning and use scenarios, but also just understanding how a consumer would interact with the board… as well as how the board could be positioned within a market.

Any chance you’d post some more development work? Would love to see some of the messy engineering, development work that went into this thing.

Cheers,
Eddie

Any chance you’d post some more development work? Would love to see some of the messy engineering, development work that went into this thing.

Yeah! We loves da messy stuff!

No worries guys, I’ll take a few pics of da messy stuff and upload in the next few days.
Btw, first short clip of the prototype stretching its legs. :slight_smile:

Cool, fly by wire(less). What’s the go-button look like?

We’re just using a RC car controller for the time being, so the throttle is a finger trigger. We’re going to finalize the controller in the next design revision.

I would imagine that after the first, serious, bail the controller might take a beating.

Between the board, the controller (assuming you go the proprietary route), the battery and it’s charging system, I’m thinkin’ you’ll really be pushing the envelop to make your retail price point. $4K USD seems short.

The electric skateboards I have worked on have an antennae contact in the handle that turns the body into an antennae and a wire loop receiver embedded in the top of the board. The system is designed to only function when the rider is standing on top of the board or very close. This prevents a lot of different situations, remote starting of the board being one of them. Are you using such a system?

We’ve done a cost analysis for making just 50 (for Kickstarter), and we are confident that it’ll fall within $4K USD :smiley:
And given that our base currency will be AUD, we’ve got fingers crossed for the exchange rate to shift in our favor :laughing:

Not in our prototype, but we have planned similar fail-safes for the production model to prevent unwanted starts and to shut the board down if the rider comes off.

This is a key element. Proximity sensing beats mechanical detectors or leashes. It is already worked out in all the boards on the market, you should have no problem to add it.

A low power setting is also key for learning or handing the controls to the friend that wants to give it a go.

Yep, agree. Different power settings is in the works too :slight_smile:

Speaking of power settings, here’s a short clip of us practicing take-off on the BajaBoard. This would probably be on a medium-high throttle setting. Not for learners.

We put on some new shocks a few days ago, and installed some LED’s. The laser has been photoshopped in, because it reminded us of a certain movie character.