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DIY Onewheel – open-source self balancing skateboard

193 points by johnsonap 5y ago

foreigner 5y ago
I never understood why these self-balancing toys are so underpowered. I want to see one built on top of a dirtbike engine that you need to wear serious body armour to use.
- zardo 5y ago
  I don't think the go-kart wheel in the middle of a skateboard layout would make for a good ride above ~35mph. Too twitchy in yaw and too limited in braking power by the geometry of the thing.
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  Well, they already have a reputation as pretty risky to ride[1]. I am sure you could scale the motor and wheel up some, but I'd want some wearable airbags... 1: https://dailyhornet.com/2021/onewheel-lawsuits-pile-up-after-deadly-nosedive-accidents/ https://dailyhornet.com/2021/onewheel-lawsuits-pile-up-after...
  - johnsonap 5y ago
    Wow, I never knew folks had died on these
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      If something moves, and someone rides on it, someone has probably also died on it.
      - johnsonap 5y ago
        very good point, I was more talking about the cause of death being a defect
        howdydoo 5y ago
        But was there actually any defect? Anyone can claim anything in a lawsuit.
        johnsonap 5y ago
        you make a valid point
        bredren 5y ago
        There is broad consensus that the One Wheel could do more to warn riders of an impending nose dive. For example, an audible tone the moment it shuts off the motor while underway. There are other design changes that could reduce the danger of a nose dive that 3rd party manufacturers have pounced on including small wheels that allow the product to potentially slow instead of come to a dead stop when an edge hits the ground. I don’t know what product liability is for continuous mounting evidence that an existing design is lacking obvious safety feature and choosing not to make changes or acknowledge this. But I suspect ultimately this will end in a class action suit.
        johnsonap 5y ago
        Thank you for the context!
        howdydoo 5y ago
        Interesting. I bought the original model when it was new and I've been happy with it. I always just viewed it as something that was inherently risky, but worth it. The board does have a way of "communicating" with you when you're pushing it too hard, by leaning you back, and it seems pretty intuitive to me. Then again I used to be a skateboarder, so maybe my risk tolerance is outside the norm. I assume these are the wheels you're talking about[1]. Pretty ingenious idea, although it does mess with the look of the board [1]: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1069745398/onewheel-xr-safety-wheels https://www.etsy.com/listing/1069745398/onewheel-xr-safety-w...
        5y ago
- mystickphoenix 5y ago
  What you're looking for is an EUC, Electric Unicycle. Most of the people in the local onewheel group I'm a member of that ride EUC's wear full motorcycle protection. At least one of them can go upwards of 45 mph.
  - karmicthreat 5y ago
    They can be pretty dangerous if you are an idiot. IE this crash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pahL4MPPOek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pahL4MPPOek
    - smithza 5y ago
      I am sure that man has many hours of safe riding. It is always the 10 seconds of deadly and uncontrollable trauma that necessitates safety gear. Self-confidence is often the hubris of humanity.
  - bicx 5y ago
    I ride a OneWheel and it can test your nerves sometimes. However, just looking at the speed and stance of a EUC makes me more nervous. You could just open your arms at 45mph and embrace the car in front of you.
  - johnsonap 5y ago
    Holy shit I just googled EUC's, those things look insane
    - Glide 5y ago
      They are insane. I bought one and learned how to ride it. It took a while and it was very frustrating before it clicked. It's surprisingly intuitive once you get going.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Have you ridden one before? I hit 15mph on a onewheel once and have no desire to ever do it again.
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    I've heard the phrase: You see people going fast on one-wheels, but you never see the same person doing so twice.
  - bredren 5y ago
    I rode 100 miles on one two years ago, and planned to take it to the Burn but after my second fall I decided to sell it and get a Space Horse from All City. I was padded up for both falls but still sustained a sprain to an ankle and some pretty mean scrapes to my shoulder and arm. My worst fall was due to the motor cutting out on a moderate acceleration uphill climb from stop. This is not unusual on the OW but is normally associated with a lower battery level. I was pretty good with it, but in the end I could justify the potential for falls once every 100 miles, let alone 50. They are fun to ride, though.
    - MivLives 5y ago
      I put about 2400 miles on mine. You fall a few times in your first 100-200 miles but after that it really doesn't happen much, and normally only when you do something stupid.
- michaelt 5y ago
  Single wheel vehicles have no brakes worthy of the name. After all, when you brake hard with a car or motorbike or bicycle, it's the front wheel, well in front of the centre of mass, that does almost all the work. In a single wheel vehicle, the wheel well in front of the centre of mass.... isn't there. In a unicycle that means you're flying off the front (it's even worse in a monowheel) so you'd better not be going faster than a man can run.
  - Groxx 5y ago
    ... which is why you lean back on these to brake, to shift your center of mass back so the wheel can slow you down. same thing in reverse for accelerating, otherwise you'd see people fall off non-stop at the beginning for the same reason you claim they can't stop. your stopping speed is limited by how fast it can decelerate you, which is essentially the same as how fast it can accelerate you. it's not super fast to stop, to be fair, but neither is a bicycle going at high speed (though I'd expect the bike to be a little bit quicker to stop).
    - MivLives 5y ago
      If you need to stop super fast you lean back so hard you're actually dragging the tail. There's a reason a lot of people put additional plastic armor on the bottom of these things.
    - samb1729 5y ago
      My issue with EUCs is the complete lack of options in the case of power cutting for any reason, whether it be overheating or low battery charge or a resistor burning out. Leaning back is not an option once the motor stops pushing the wheel towards you - it’ll roll and then tumble to a stop much more quickly than air resistance slows you down, so you’ll fly off the front. I’d like for there to be a magic solution to this problem since the size of an EUC is very attractive. Rolling to a safe stop on my electric scooter is preferable in the meantime.
      - Groxx 5y ago
        yeah, an instant loss in acceleration would certainly make you eat pavement in many cases. definitely a fair concern. I might claim that "I hit a rock slightly larger than that small rock I can usually roll over and now I'm in an impromptu pole-vault competition" is a more common issue with small scooter wheels than random power losses, but there's more personal control over that. (personally: crossing train tracks were my #1 fear and #1 fall cause on scooters) either way, safety gear safety gear safety gear. especially since basically all these electric personal mobility enhancing whatsits are horrifyingly injury-prone compared to anything the size of a bike or larger.
- frankus 5y ago
  There are a lot of practical problems trying to build a balancing vehicle around an internal combustion engine. They can't produce any torque at zero speed, they can't smoothly reverse direction, they likely can't produce enough negative torque at higher speeds, and their control bandwidth is probably inadequate for anyone but an extremely skilled rider.
- gnopgnip 5y ago
  You are limited in how fast you can safely go by how fast you can stop
- gregn610 5y ago
  Have you seen the original Australian bushpig? https://youtu.be/0OV33C2JgIE https://youtu.be/0OV33C2JgIE
- MivLives 5y ago
  It's for legal reasons in a lot of places. Most places have laws about the max speed of motor powered devices. It's normally around twenty. I've gone up to 24 MPH (on flat) when I had one, and have hit the ground going twenty. I'm honestly not sure more speed is a good idea as it just takes one little crack in the road you weren't anticipating to throw you balance off.
transistor-man 5y ago
Nice video series! With some incredibly odd timing, I documented building a onewheel right before the commercial ones existed, for a 2014 writeup: https://transistor-man.com/flying_nimbus.html https://transistor-man.com/flying_nimbus.html So jealous that off the shelf hub-motor in wheel assemblies exist now, i had to build a custom hub and dealt with the oddities of planetary backlash, then ended up fitting an early direct drive motor.
- dbspin 5y ago
  'incredibly odd timing'. I pray that I live long enough to develop such equanimity, assuming you got ripped off.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    It's a pretty big planet. At any given time, probably thousands of engineers are simultaneously thinking of building the same "next new thing."
    - AYBABTME 5y ago
      There's a named phenomenon for this... I can't put my finger on it. Something about discoveries/inventions all independently piling up at the same time whenever all conditions are right in history.
      - callmemclovin 5y ago
        Maybe you're thinking of the concept of multiple discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
- osamagirl69 5y ago
  It really is amazing how much the state of the art in hub motors has come since 2012. Building silly electric vehicles is almost too easy now that you no longer need to wind your own motor and write your own bldc commutation firmware...
amelius 5y ago
I personally prefer walking 30 minutes over standing still for 10 minutes ... Never understood the Segway either.
- JPKab 5y ago
  Haha, fair point. To be clear, the production Onewheels are a very good workout to ride. Unlike a segway, they require a lot of balance and hip/leg movements. Additionally, they are extremely maneuverable. I ride mine on mountain bike trails here in Colorado. Not sure you are into mountain biking, but one of my favorite aspects of riding is hitting the berms at a moderately high speed and cruising up the wall like i'm riding in a pool at the skate park. You get sweaty as hell, and new riders can only ride for short periods of time before suffering lots of fatigue in feet/legs/hips. Edit: One of my favorite trail riding videos on onewheel https://youtu.be/_jyAGgaxPv4?t=25 https://youtu.be/_jyAGgaxPv4?t=25
  - amelius 5y ago
    I must confess that it looks cool, a bit like snowboarding without snow. How do you control the speed?
    - chewxy 5y ago
      The OneWheel operates based on balancing mass. So you put more mass on one side, the OneWheel moves that way. Put more mass, it goes faster. Some people drive using their hips (me included), some people drive using their shoulders (I don't understand why one would do this)
    - JPKab 5y ago
      When you put more pressure on your back foot, it triggers regenerative braking. The regen brakes are actually very good. You can easily go from a pretty good clip to walking pace very smoothly and extremely quickly. Acceleration is almost instantaneous as well.
  - MikeKusold 5y ago
    > I ride mine on mountain bike trails here in Colorado. You shouldn't be. Those are motorized vehicles and are not allowed on non-motorized trails.
s5300 5y ago
https://forum.esk8.news/search?q=Onewheel https://forum.esk8.news/search?q=Onewheel
gtm1260 5y ago
Skeptical at first but this thing looks pretty sweet. Total BOM estimated at ~700$, and similar performance to the 2500$ onewheel XR it seems!
vanous 5y ago
This is cool and horrifying at the same time, just be very careful if you are trying such a thing. We just had an initial support for VESC NRF/HM10 devices added into Gadgetbridge if this is of interest to anyone fascinated in this subject. https://blog.freeyourgadget.org/release-0_64_0.html https://blog.freeyourgadget.org/release-0_64_0.html
- tyingq 5y ago
  Managing the size of the gaps between the wheel and the platform seems like one safety centric issue. Too narrow and it can suck up some skin into the narrow hole. Too wide and it pulls in a whole shoe, or leaves not enough flat surface. I'm curious what the optimal size is, and whether there are more ways to safeguard it.
  - dghlsakjg 5y ago
    As the owner of a commercial onewheel, The gap is pretty small on those. Maybe 1/4". However, the real solution is to just get a fender since riding on anything but clean pavement leads to a lot of dirt being flung around.
  - johnsonap 5y ago
    Yeah I was noticing how wide the gaps were on his
    - transistor-man 5y ago
      How well did the force sensitive resistors workout over time? I found these switches that are used as push-buttons on public buses they work fairly well and survive splash/grime [1] [2] I contacted them ages ago and they sent a demo kit for free. 1: https://www.tapeswitch.com/ https://www.tapeswitch.com/ 2: https://transistor-man.com/PhotoSet/flying_nimbus_MKIII/P1080013.JPG https://transistor-man.com/PhotoSet/flying_nimbus_MKIII/P108...
sbierwagen 5y ago
>As far as the battery goes, the XR has a 324Wh nickel manganese cobalt oxide battery (that’s a mouthful!) while the one I built has a 960Wh Lithium Ion battery pack. NMC is a type of lithium-ion battery. The cell voltage of the ebike battery he's using is 3.7v, which means it also uses NMC cells.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tyingq 5y ago
  Ah, yeah. Seems a bad communication consequence of Lithium-Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt-Oxide (LiNiMnCoO2) going by the "NMC" nickname.
btreecat 5y ago
Love it! I just got a PintX and have been learning how to shred on it. But naturally I was curious how much work would go into a DIY model.
frankus 5y ago
If you're remotely interested in this sort of thing, definitely check out the VESC project (https://vesc-project.com https://vesc-project.com), which is kind of the secret sauce that makes this sort of thing accessible to mere mortals. There are a lot of hardware variants at different price and quality points but it's a great, hackable, open-source (GPL3) motor controller for smallish motors (in the 24-44 volt range—they typically use a gate drive/power supply controller with a 60V limit).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- AYBABTME 5y ago
  Do you mean 24-48? 44V is pretty odd, and I assume 48V means <60V?
  - frankus 5y ago
    I don't really know if there's a firm consensus as to the official nominal voltage of a lithium ion cell, but I was going off of 10 cells (in series, aka "10S") being considered a 36V system (that gets up to ~42V when fully charged). 12S seems to be considered the highest voltage that the original VESC can reliably handle, which works out to 43.2V at 3.6V per cell.
71a54xd 5y ago
I like one-wheel type devices but will always prefer electric unicycles. They have more range [0], more safety over large bumps (due to a larger wheel and facing forward) and are easier to carry around when you're walking. Unfortunately, due to liability laws in america most of the EUC manufacturers are based in China. I CANNOT wait for an american company to start producing EUC's! I learned to ride an InMotion V8 [1] during the pandemic, and although there was a significant learning curve, it's now my favorite way to get around new york city. Definitely wear a full face helmet and wrist pads though if you decide to learn to ride! 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1aRPKyjzj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1aRPKyjzj0 1 - https://www.ewheels.com/product/new-inmotion-v8s-728wh-battery-1000w-motor/ https://www.ewheels.com/product/new-inmotion-v8s-728wh-batte...
MivLives 5y ago
I'm sorta terrified of this. I know more then one rider that broke bones, or got other injuries from the official version of these just randomly conking out. A DIY version made by a lot of people seems even more likely. Also seems super inconvenient to move around. The XR was already annoying to take into shops as it was heavy and long. This is heavier and longer. Though the extra weight might smooth out the ride a bit. Surprised he went for a smaller tire. I feel like a larger one would take bumps better.
- JPKab 5y ago
  Agreed. As a longtime rider, I will unequivocally state that 95% of serious injuries on these things are from new riders who get overconfident (and ignore every single piece of advice on the website and on the tons of Youtube channels) and suffer nosedives when their small muscles in their legs (and nervous system as well) experience fatigue and trigger involuntary tremors. (any rock climber here will know what I'm talking about: When you see a newb climber getting this fatigue and their leg starts shaking like Elvis...) The smaller wheel is a bad idea. Period. Can't fault the heavier weight though. Future Motion machines their aluminum rails from single billets. It's not something that you can replicate easily without tremendous capital expenditure. I'm planning on buying the new GT soon, but it's even heavier, and my god is it awful carrying those things around.
  - thrashh 5y ago
    I haven’t used these but I can ask say from general experience is that you get injured when you do something outside your skill level. So sometimes you’ll hear about someone getting injured doing something but I find it to be a meaningless data point usually.
    - MivLives 5y ago
      There's also the accidents happen thing. Sometimes the wheel slips, sometimes you didn't quite think the crack was as offset, sometimes the wind blows unexpectedly and causes you to swerve. It's not just the people pushing it that get hurt though that is a lot of the injuries.
JPKab 5y ago
I'm a daily rider of a Onewheel XR. I've got a few thousand miles on mine, and I do a ton of trail riding here in Colorado. I'm pretty obsessed with these things. All that aside, I would advise anyone who wants to try going this route to watch their ass. A standard Future Motion developed Onewheel is an extremely dangerous device. I always, always wear a helmet on mine. If you wear a helmet, the device pretty much stops being fatally dangerous, and just becomes a source of rather mild injuries if/when you fall. I rarely fall on mine now, and when I do, I don't get injured due to standard skateboarding/mountain biking pads. All that being said, FM put a TON of energy and learning into their firmware. A onewheel that cruises on a smooth surface is relatively straightforward compared to one that can be reliably ridden in rough conditions, handle bumps/voltage sags/etc gracefully, and just be super durable as well. I could definitely see an open source onewheel eventually becoming on par with FM's XR. But if you're an early adopter of this thing, be ready to fall, A LOT.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  I'm really surprised trails allow motorized conveyance anywhere in Colorado. Are you sticking to jeep trails or something?
  - JPKab 5y ago
    See my exchange in another thread. Depends on who manages the land the trails are on. National Forest doesn’t allow them, but rangers don’t enforce it. National Wildlife Refuge allows them. County open space where I ride only bans gas powered vehicles. Bans of “motorized” vehicles enacted decades ago were intended to keep loud, polluting, fast, and heavy dirt bikes off trails. Electric motors that top out at under 20mph have been swept into this. Eventually, like mountain bikes, people will realize the bans make no sense and allow them.
    - seattle_spring 5y ago
      Mountain bikes still severely fuck up trails, there's a reason lots of trails are for hikers only.
pengaru 5y ago
FFS someone please convince the author of this page to recompress these photos using high compression and a lossy format like jpg. Over a minute and still not loaded here.
masukomi 5y ago
this is cool, BUT as a onewheel owner who's spent way too much time learning about them and the knock-offs, it's not the hardware that's the tricky bit. It's the software. the knockoffs are NOT GOOD and thus even _more_ dangerous to ride because no-one else has figured out how to get the balancing software right. so, yeah, if you go into this project, know that regardless of how awesome your hardware skills are, the software is the bit that's _really_ going to take a lot of time if you want an experience anywhere close to the official one.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I like how the control algorithm doesn't even appear in this project because there is so much tech already made and cheaply available. That's a testament to electronic commodities: all of these specific little control devices ... gyros, 9D IMUs, ESC, etc. ... are available online for a few bucks. Still blows my mind. EDIT: Whoa, the VESC stuff is really expensive.
tomcam 5y ago
Are any of these usable with a totally passive payload? Would make a dandy ghost for a haunted house
aaws11 5y ago
https://archive.fo/bpFyg https://archive.fo/bpFyg I am unable to read this, not sure if it's a hug of death

193 points by johnsonap 5y ago

I never understood why these self-balancing toys are so underpowered. I want to see one built on top of a dirtbike engine that you need to wear serious body armour to use.

zardo 5y ago
I don't think the go-kart wheel in the middle of a skateboard layout would make for a good ride above ~35mph. Too twitchy in yaw and too limited in braking power by the geometry of the thing.
blacksmith_tb 5y ago
Well, they already have a reputation as pretty risky to ride[1]. I am sure you could scale the motor and wheel up some, but I'd want some wearable airbags... 1: https://dailyhornet.com/2021/onewheel-lawsuits-pile-up-after-deadly-nosedive-accidents/ https://dailyhornet.com/2021/onewheel-lawsuits-pile-up-after...
- johnsonap 5y ago
  Wow, I never knew folks had died on these
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    If something moves, and someone rides on it, someone has probably also died on it.
    - johnsonap 5y ago
      very good point, I was more talking about the cause of death being a defect
      - howdydoo 5y ago
        But was there actually any defect? Anyone can claim anything in a lawsuit.
        johnsonap 5y ago
        you make a valid point
        bredren 5y ago
        There is broad consensus that the One Wheel could do more to warn riders of an impending nose dive. For example, an audible tone the moment it shuts off the motor while underway. There are other design changes that could reduce the danger of a nose dive that 3rd party manufacturers have pounced on including small wheels that allow the product to potentially slow instead of come to a dead stop when an edge hits the ground. I don’t know what product liability is for continuous mounting evidence that an existing design is lacking obvious safety feature and choosing not to make changes or acknowledge this. But I suspect ultimately this will end in a class action suit.
        johnsonap 5y ago
        Thank you for the context!
        howdydoo 5y ago
        Interesting. I bought the original model when it was new and I've been happy with it. I always just viewed it as something that was inherently risky, but worth it. The board does have a way of "communicating" with you when you're pushing it too hard, by leaning you back, and it seems pretty intuitive to me. Then again I used to be a skateboarder, so maybe my risk tolerance is outside the norm. I assume these are the wheels you're talking about[1]. Pretty ingenious idea, although it does mess with the look of the board [1]: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1069745398/onewheel-xr-safety-wheels https://www.etsy.com/listing/1069745398/onewheel-xr-safety-w...
        5y ago
mystickphoenix 5y ago
What you're looking for is an EUC, Electric Unicycle. Most of the people in the local onewheel group I'm a member of that ride EUC's wear full motorcycle protection. At least one of them can go upwards of 45 mph.
- karmicthreat 5y ago
  They can be pretty dangerous if you are an idiot. IE this crash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pahL4MPPOek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pahL4MPPOek
  - smithza 5y ago
    I am sure that man has many hours of safe riding. It is always the 10 seconds of deadly and uncontrollable trauma that necessitates safety gear. Self-confidence is often the hubris of humanity.
- bicx 5y ago
  I ride a OneWheel and it can test your nerves sometimes. However, just looking at the speed and stance of a EUC makes me more nervous. You could just open your arms at 45mph and embrace the car in front of you.
- johnsonap 5y ago
  Holy shit I just googled EUC's, those things look insane
  - Glide 5y ago
    They are insane. I bought one and learned how to ride it. It took a while and it was very frustrating before it clicked. It's surprisingly intuitive once you get going.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
Have you ridden one before? I hit 15mph on a onewheel once and have no desire to ever do it again.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  I've heard the phrase: You see people going fast on one-wheels, but you never see the same person doing so twice.
- bredren 5y ago
  I rode 100 miles on one two years ago, and planned to take it to the Burn but after my second fall I decided to sell it and get a Space Horse from All City. I was padded up for both falls but still sustained a sprain to an ankle and some pretty mean scrapes to my shoulder and arm. My worst fall was due to the motor cutting out on a moderate acceleration uphill climb from stop. This is not unusual on the OW but is normally associated with a lower battery level. I was pretty good with it, but in the end I could justify the potential for falls once every 100 miles, let alone 50. They are fun to ride, though.
  - MivLives 5y ago
    I put about 2400 miles on mine. You fall a few times in your first 100-200 miles but after that it really doesn't happen much, and normally only when you do something stupid.
michaelt 5y ago
Single wheel vehicles have no brakes worthy of the name. After all, when you brake hard with a car or motorbike or bicycle, it's the front wheel, well in front of the centre of mass, that does almost all the work. In a single wheel vehicle, the wheel well in front of the centre of mass.... isn't there. In a unicycle that means you're flying off the front (it's even worse in a monowheel) so you'd better not be going faster than a man can run.
- Groxx 5y ago
  ... which is why you lean back on these to brake, to shift your center of mass back so the wheel can slow you down. same thing in reverse for accelerating, otherwise you'd see people fall off non-stop at the beginning for the same reason you claim they can't stop. your stopping speed is limited by how fast it can decelerate you, which is essentially the same as how fast it can accelerate you. it's not super fast to stop, to be fair, but neither is a bicycle going at high speed (though I'd expect the bike to be a little bit quicker to stop).
  - MivLives 5y ago
    If you need to stop super fast you lean back so hard you're actually dragging the tail. There's a reason a lot of people put additional plastic armor on the bottom of these things.
  - samb1729 5y ago
    My issue with EUCs is the complete lack of options in the case of power cutting for any reason, whether it be overheating or low battery charge or a resistor burning out. Leaning back is not an option once the motor stops pushing the wheel towards you - it’ll roll and then tumble to a stop much more quickly than air resistance slows you down, so you’ll fly off the front. I’d like for there to be a magic solution to this problem since the size of an EUC is very attractive. Rolling to a safe stop on my electric scooter is preferable in the meantime.
    - Groxx 5y ago
      yeah, an instant loss in acceleration would certainly make you eat pavement in many cases. definitely a fair concern. I might claim that "I hit a rock slightly larger than that small rock I can usually roll over and now I'm in an impromptu pole-vault competition" is a more common issue with small scooter wheels than random power losses, but there's more personal control over that. (personally: crossing train tracks were my #1 fear and #1 fall cause on scooters) either way, safety gear safety gear safety gear. especially since basically all these electric personal mobility enhancing whatsits are horrifyingly injury-prone compared to anything the size of a bike or larger.
frankus 5y ago
There are a lot of practical problems trying to build a balancing vehicle around an internal combustion engine. They can't produce any torque at zero speed, they can't smoothly reverse direction, they likely can't produce enough negative torque at higher speeds, and their control bandwidth is probably inadequate for anyone but an extremely skilled rider.
gnopgnip 5y ago
You are limited in how fast you can safely go by how fast you can stop
gregn610 5y ago
Have you seen the original Australian bushpig? https://youtu.be/0OV33C2JgIE https://youtu.be/0OV33C2JgIE
MivLives 5y ago
It's for legal reasons in a lot of places. Most places have laws about the max speed of motor powered devices. It's normally around twenty. I've gone up to 24 MPH (on flat) when I had one, and have hit the ground going twenty. I'm honestly not sure more speed is a good idea as it just takes one little crack in the road you weren't anticipating to throw you balance off.

transistor-man 5y ago

Nice video series! With some incredibly odd timing, I documented building a onewheel right before the commercial ones existed, for a 2014 writeup: https://transistor-man.com/flying_nimbus.html https://transistor-man.com/flying_nimbus.html So jealous that off the shelf hub-motor in wheel assemblies exist now, i had to build a custom hub and dealt with the oddities of planetary backlash, then ended up fitting an early direct drive motor.

dbspin 5y ago
'incredibly odd timing'. I pray that I live long enough to develop such equanimity, assuming you got ripped off.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  It's a pretty big planet. At any given time, probably thousands of engineers are simultaneously thinking of building the same "next new thing."
  - AYBABTME 5y ago
    There's a named phenomenon for this... I can't put my finger on it. Something about discoveries/inventions all independently piling up at the same time whenever all conditions are right in history.
    - callmemclovin 5y ago
      Maybe you're thinking of the concept of multiple discovery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
osamagirl69 5y ago
It really is amazing how much the state of the art in hub motors has come since 2012. Building silly electric vehicles is almost too easy now that you no longer need to wind your own motor and write your own bldc commutation firmware...

amelius 5y ago

I personally prefer walking 30 minutes over standing still for 10 minutes ... Never understood the Segway either.

JPKab 5y ago
Haha, fair point. To be clear, the production Onewheels are a very good workout to ride. Unlike a segway, they require a lot of balance and hip/leg movements. Additionally, they are extremely maneuverable. I ride mine on mountain bike trails here in Colorado. Not sure you are into mountain biking, but one of my favorite aspects of riding is hitting the berms at a moderately high speed and cruising up the wall like i'm riding in a pool at the skate park. You get sweaty as hell, and new riders can only ride for short periods of time before suffering lots of fatigue in feet/legs/hips. Edit: One of my favorite trail riding videos on onewheel https://youtu.be/_jyAGgaxPv4?t=25 https://youtu.be/_jyAGgaxPv4?t=25
- amelius 5y ago
  I must confess that it looks cool, a bit like snowboarding without snow. How do you control the speed?
  - chewxy 5y ago
    The OneWheel operates based on balancing mass. So you put more mass on one side, the OneWheel moves that way. Put more mass, it goes faster. Some people drive using their hips (me included), some people drive using their shoulders (I don't understand why one would do this)
  - JPKab 5y ago
    When you put more pressure on your back foot, it triggers regenerative braking. The regen brakes are actually very good. You can easily go from a pretty good clip to walking pace very smoothly and extremely quickly. Acceleration is almost instantaneous as well.
- MikeKusold 5y ago
  > I ride mine on mountain bike trails here in Colorado. You shouldn't be. Those are motorized vehicles and are not allowed on non-motorized trails.

s5300 5y ago

https://forum.esk8.news/search?q=Onewheel https://forum.esk8.news/search?q=Onewheel

gtm1260 5y ago

Skeptical at first but this thing looks pretty sweet. Total BOM estimated at ~700$, and similar performance to the 2500$ onewheel XR it seems!

vanous 5y ago

This is cool and horrifying at the same time, just be very careful if you are trying such a thing. We just had an initial support for VESC NRF/HM10 devices added into Gadgetbridge if this is of interest to anyone fascinated in this subject. https://blog.freeyourgadget.org/release-0_64_0.html https://blog.freeyourgadget.org/release-0_64_0.html

tyingq 5y ago
Managing the size of the gaps between the wheel and the platform seems like one safety centric issue. Too narrow and it can suck up some skin into the narrow hole. Too wide and it pulls in a whole shoe, or leaves not enough flat surface. I'm curious what the optimal size is, and whether there are more ways to safeguard it.
- dghlsakjg 5y ago
  As the owner of a commercial onewheel, The gap is pretty small on those. Maybe 1/4". However, the real solution is to just get a fender since riding on anything but clean pavement leads to a lot of dirt being flung around.
- johnsonap 5y ago
  Yeah I was noticing how wide the gaps were on his
  - transistor-man 5y ago
    How well did the force sensitive resistors workout over time? I found these switches that are used as push-buttons on public buses they work fairly well and survive splash/grime [1] [2] I contacted them ages ago and they sent a demo kit for free. 1: https://www.tapeswitch.com/ https://www.tapeswitch.com/ 2: https://transistor-man.com/PhotoSet/flying_nimbus_MKIII/P1080013.JPG https://transistor-man.com/PhotoSet/flying_nimbus_MKIII/P108...

sbierwagen 5y ago

>As far as the battery goes, the XR has a 324Wh nickel manganese cobalt oxide battery (that’s a mouthful!) while the one I built has a 960Wh Lithium Ion battery pack. NMC is a type of lithium-ion battery. The cell voltage of the ebike battery he's using is 3.7v, which means it also uses NMC cells.

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tyingq 5y ago
Ah, yeah. Seems a bad communication consequence of Lithium-Nickel-Manganese-Cobalt-Oxide (LiNiMnCoO2) going by the "NMC" nickname.

btreecat 5y ago

Love it! I just got a PintX and have been learning how to shred on it. But naturally I was curious how much work would go into a DIY model.

frankus 5y ago

If you're remotely interested in this sort of thing, definitely check out the VESC project (https://vesc-project.com https://vesc-project.com), which is kind of the secret sauce that makes this sort of thing accessible to mere mortals. There are a lot of hardware variants at different price and quality points but it's a great, hackable, open-source (GPL3) motor controller for smallish motors (in the 24-44 volt range—they typically use a gate drive/power supply controller with a 60V limit).

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AYBABTME 5y ago
Do you mean 24-48? 44V is pretty odd, and I assume 48V means <60V?
- frankus 5y ago
  I don't really know if there's a firm consensus as to the official nominal voltage of a lithium ion cell, but I was going off of 10 cells (in series, aka "10S") being considered a 36V system (that gets up to ~42V when fully charged). 12S seems to be considered the highest voltage that the original VESC can reliably handle, which works out to 43.2V at 3.6V per cell.

71a54xd 5y ago

I like one-wheel type devices but will always prefer electric unicycles. They have more range [0], more safety over large bumps (due to a larger wheel and facing forward) and are easier to carry around when you're walking. Unfortunately, due to liability laws in america most of the EUC manufacturers are based in China. I CANNOT wait for an american company to start producing EUC's! I learned to ride an InMotion V8 [1] during the pandemic, and although there was a significant learning curve, it's now my favorite way to get around new york city. Definitely wear a full face helmet and wrist pads though if you decide to learn to ride! 0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1aRPKyjzj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1aRPKyjzj0 1 - https://www.ewheels.com/product/new-inmotion-v8s-728wh-battery-1000w-motor/ https://www.ewheels.com/product/new-inmotion-v8s-728wh-batte...

MivLives 5y ago

I'm sorta terrified of this. I know more then one rider that broke bones, or got other injuries from the official version of these just randomly conking out. A DIY version made by a lot of people seems even more likely. Also seems super inconvenient to move around. The XR was already annoying to take into shops as it was heavy and long. This is heavier and longer. Though the extra weight might smooth out the ride a bit. Surprised he went for a smaller tire. I feel like a larger one would take bumps better.

JPKab 5y ago
Agreed. As a longtime rider, I will unequivocally state that 95% of serious injuries on these things are from new riders who get overconfident (and ignore every single piece of advice on the website and on the tons of Youtube channels) and suffer nosedives when their small muscles in their legs (and nervous system as well) experience fatigue and trigger involuntary tremors. (any rock climber here will know what I'm talking about: When you see a newb climber getting this fatigue and their leg starts shaking like Elvis...) The smaller wheel is a bad idea. Period. Can't fault the heavier weight though. Future Motion machines their aluminum rails from single billets. It's not something that you can replicate easily without tremendous capital expenditure. I'm planning on buying the new GT soon, but it's even heavier, and my god is it awful carrying those things around.
- thrashh 5y ago
  I haven’t used these but I can ask say from general experience is that you get injured when you do something outside your skill level. So sometimes you’ll hear about someone getting injured doing something but I find it to be a meaningless data point usually.
  - MivLives 5y ago
    There's also the accidents happen thing. Sometimes the wheel slips, sometimes you didn't quite think the crack was as offset, sometimes the wind blows unexpectedly and causes you to swerve. It's not just the people pushing it that get hurt though that is a lot of the injuries.

JPKab 5y ago

I'm a daily rider of a Onewheel XR. I've got a few thousand miles on mine, and I do a ton of trail riding here in Colorado. I'm pretty obsessed with these things. All that aside, I would advise anyone who wants to try going this route to watch their ass. A standard Future Motion developed Onewheel is an extremely dangerous device. I always, always wear a helmet on mine. If you wear a helmet, the device pretty much stops being fatally dangerous, and just becomes a source of rather mild injuries if/when you fall. I rarely fall on mine now, and when I do, I don't get injured due to standard skateboarding/mountain biking pads. All that being said, FM put a TON of energy and learning into their firmware. A onewheel that cruises on a smooth surface is relatively straightforward compared to one that can be reliably ridden in rough conditions, handle bumps/voltage sags/etc gracefully, and just be super durable as well. I could definitely see an open source onewheel eventually becoming on par with FM's XR. But if you're an early adopter of this thing, be ready to fall, A LOT.

seattle_spring 5y ago
I'm really surprised trails allow motorized conveyance anywhere in Colorado. Are you sticking to jeep trails or something?
- JPKab 5y ago
  See my exchange in another thread. Depends on who manages the land the trails are on. National Forest doesn’t allow them, but rangers don’t enforce it. National Wildlife Refuge allows them. County open space where I ride only bans gas powered vehicles. Bans of “motorized” vehicles enacted decades ago were intended to keep loud, polluting, fast, and heavy dirt bikes off trails. Electric motors that top out at under 20mph have been swept into this. Eventually, like mountain bikes, people will realize the bans make no sense and allow them.
  - seattle_spring 5y ago
    Mountain bikes still severely fuck up trails, there's a reason lots of trails are for hikers only.

pengaru 5y ago

FFS someone please convince the author of this page to recompress these photos using high compression and a lossy format like jpg. Over a minute and still not loaded here.

masukomi 5y ago

this is cool, BUT as a onewheel owner who's spent way too much time learning about them and the knock-offs, it's not the hardware that's the tricky bit. It's the software. the knockoffs are NOT GOOD and thus even _more_ dangerous to ride because no-one else has figured out how to get the balancing software right. so, yeah, if you go into this project, know that regardless of how awesome your hardware skills are, the software is the bit that's _really_ going to take a lot of time if you want an experience anywhere close to the official one.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I like how the control algorithm doesn't even appear in this project because there is so much tech already made and cheaply available. That's a testament to electronic commodities: all of these specific little control devices ... gyros, 9D IMUs, ESC, etc. ... are available online for a few bucks. Still blows my mind. EDIT: Whoa, the VESC stuff is really expensive.

tomcam 5y ago

Are any of these usable with a totally passive payload? Would make a dandy ghost for a haunted house

aaws11 5y ago

https://archive.fo/bpFyg https://archive.fo/bpFyg I am unable to read this, not sure if it's a hug of death