Electronics and wiring
This is one of the most important aspect of building an electric skateboard. Given the amount of energy needed to make your esk8 goes, you can't make any mistake while wiring your components. It's essential to understand how and why DIYers do things a specific way.
Wiring
Before going into details, let's list the components that we need to wire together:
- electric motor
- ESC
- remote receiver
- battery
- a way to turn on/off the board
Of course more components can be added to it, but that's a good start.
Rough preview
Look at the schematics below to get an idea of how things are connected together:
There are different ways to go depending on single vs dual drive, but also depending on the ESC you're going to buy.
Most ESCs are single motor, so in the case where you want dual drive, one ESC will be the master, receives commands from the controller, drives one motor, sends information to the second ESC (slave) which will drive its motor as well. The battery is connected to both, in parallel. So manufacturers managed to build dual ESCs that are able to drive 2 motors directly, which is handy.
On/Off switch
This might seem dumb, but we need a way to power the esk8 on and off. First thing: given the current and voltage, we can't just use a simple on/off switch. One of those would just arc and even solder itself.
To remedy this though, there are multiple solutions. As this subject isn't actually that simple, we have a dedicated page for it:
Connectors
Now that we have a rough idea of what and how things are connected, let's go a bit deeper and add connectors. Because wires aren't going to connect magically to the components. As the subject is not that simple, we've compiled the information on a separate page.