4WD x Landwheel x Bustin Cigar x 8s6p

Yo.

My extended spring break has driven me to push forward with this project in a big way, and I’ve been working on it more consistently since then. Chances are this will be a long, albeit high quality read, so settle in friends.

If you’re interested more in the electronics of this build, check out my FrankenWheel thread for how I put it all together.

This DIY build is kind of a re-construction / upgrade of the legend of a time-sink that was the FrankenWheel project.

My wheels got turning in my head when I received a deck from @eb1925 for my Secret Santa present this year. The deck is a Bustin Cigar, and I’d honestly never seen one before.

This deck came straight by itself without grip tape, and it got me thinking. My FrankenWheel board has a deck that I’ve been running for 4.5 years now and it is absolutely beat to garbage. The back is falling apart and twisting, the front is almost the same now, and it’s got a plethora of holes in it from my enclosures, not to mention the wear and tear that it had from riding it off curbs as a push board. All in all, I’m happy and impressed that the little Atom deck that I have hasn’t splintered into pieces. However, it is time for a new one.

This Bustin Cigar has an interesting shape to it, hinting that the enclosure needed to be redesigned and upgraded to be worthy of being put on this brand new deck.

After I got on the black grip tape and threw on a pair of trucks that I had laying around along with the X-things that I got, I knew that it was time to get into CAD. Interestingly, I meant originally for these X-things to go on my main board, but they had a classic hole pattern, so I had to put them on this deck since my main board doesn’t have classic pattern holes.

Expand this section to read about my bumpers / cable routing risers.

Bumper - Risers

Because of the damage that decks sustain on their end from setting them on concrete, etc, I knew that I wanted this deck to have bumpers on the front and back, so one of the first things I did was design some riser - cable - route - bumpers. These are 0.30 inches thick to accommodate the thickness of the Landwheel hub motors, both front and back, as well as providing a short amount of PLA+ bumper that prevents the wood of the board from hitting the ground.

I did two revisions of these, the first one with the wires going straight out the side, and then one that provides a bit more of a natural angle to their path.


These risers should function successfully as protection for the cables of the Landwheel Hubs (their wire routing through the center of the truck is a bit tight in my opinion), bumpers, and nifty wire routes to make the wires travel straight into their enclosures.

Moving along, the next clear step is to design the enclosure. All of my Engineering friends know me quite well as the overachiever, the project manager, and the “why do it the easy way when I can do it the cool way” type of person. The reason why I mention this is because the next step of this process that I took is very extra and probably not necessary, however, I had fun and learned some stuff!

Expand this section to read about my photogrammetry adventure

Photogrammetry

Photogrammetry. Take that word and try to say it three times fast. Photogrammetry is an intriguing process that uses a series of pictures to create a 3D model of an object using math, triangulation, focal length data, and 3D positioning. This process creates a high poly count mesh of the object scanned that allows the user to make a 3D OBJ (or other) file that creates a virtual representation of something in the real world. I originally saw this idea done by @JamieT back in July 2019, and I dug up his post to see how he did it as well.

Classic Kicker | 36" Kebbek Top Mount | eCaliber II | 2x Maytech 6355 170kv | Boardnamics + 15mm drive@40T/18T | 12s3p 21700 40t | Unity?

There are many ways to go about this process, with the best option being a full setup made specifically for the process. Objects to be scanned should not have reflective surfaces, they should be a consistent and distinct texture, and they should be well and evenly lit in all directions.

Here’s some links that I found useful when researching this process:
https://www.3dscanstore.com/blog/3d-scanning-reflective-objects
https://support.capturingreality.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001528211-Taking-pictures-for-photogrammetry
https://alicevision.org/#
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D0EhSi-vvc&ab_channel=Gamefromscratch

The first link in this list was one of the first ones I found and was a good read on the whole process from a specific setup kind of way. I did not use my DSLR like recommended to take the pictures and instead used my phone. I may have had better results had I used my DSLR.

So what have I been rambling on about? I decided to 3D scan my new deck and use its profile to make my enclosures perfectly form fitting. Once I started pushing this deck around, I realized that it is quite flexible, probably even moreso than my old one. Usually the way I go about creating a deck in CAD is just by taking some measurements of the arcs on the board and doing some math to figure out what the curves should be. I thought, this way, I would be able to circumvent that and learn something new. Anyways, here we are.

The process begins by taking a lot of photos of your object, from many angles. You should take the photos of your object around its center point, rotating around in all directions, keeping it at the center and ensuring that it is captured from every angle. After you do it the first time, you can throw all the pictures into Meshroom and realize that you probably didn’t get enough and do it three more times. Oh wait just me?

After taking all of the photos, the next step is to import into your software package. There are several pieces of software that I used in this process. The first one I tried was Regard3D, a free program that allows you to manually create photogrammetry projects. The only real reason that I tried this was because when I first installed Meshroom, it didn’t work properly.

With Regard3D, you have to follow the process outlined on their git page otherwise it makes no sense. Following that with my first set of images that I took, I got a decent - ish scan of the deck.

Now the photos I took of this were honestly kind of not great, so I already knew I needed to redo it. I tried 3 more times with different settings and I just couldn’t get the result that I wanted, so I looked around some more and came full circle to Meshroom, which all of a sudden decided to work. I was pretty happy about this because from what I read, it was one of the most user-friendly ones.

After transitioning to Meshroom, I started having a better experience. I read up a little bit more on how to properly take pictures for photogrammetry and my first try in Meshroom worked pretty well.

I propped the board on top of a Home Depot bucket because I thought that it would help, but in the end I think it just made it a lot harder for the software to place the anchors of the mesh. I decided to do another set of photos but make sure that every single angle was covered.

Just by looking at this screenshot, it’s pretty obvious that there are more photos. I believe that there was over 150 shots in the scan, and it ended up producing a pretty decent result.

You’d think that maybe the process ends here but you’d be wrong. There are a few more steps. The next step is to clean up the mesh from Meshroom and make it usable. Before exporting from Meshroom I played with some of the refinement settings until I was happy with the surface finish, and then moved on to Blender.

In Blender, I imported the OBJ file from the folder structure and deleted all of the extraneous data that was scanned outside of the deck.

It looks a bit weird but in this scan it captured a lot of the yard around where I scanned the deck, so all of that had to be removed and I ended up with the deck more or less on its own.

The mesh that you get out of the scan is extremely dense, so the next step is to reduce the poly count. I tried using a program called MeshLab but it was really confusing, and from the recommendations @JamieT 's thread, I found Instant Meshes. Using this I was able to reduce the mesh poly count to a much more reasonable level.

So after all of this, I’ve got a reasonable stl that I can use, this goes straight into Fusion360. The process here is similar to how I would have created the model in the first place, but either way I still learned how to do photogrammetry.

From this point on, I knew I would just end up using a profile on path sweep, so I inserted a few construction planes at key places in the mesh and sketched out the profiles of concave and swept it like normal.

The interesting part here is that I didn’t actually realize that I hadn’t scaled the mesh until I started looking at the enclosure design and saw that the dimensions made no sense. This is the fully scaled-up model with the sweep of the curves within. After all the effort, I didn’t have a perfect sweep or shape, but hey at least I only needed to measure two dimensions to scale it lol

Expand this section to read about the enclosure design

Enclosure Design

I looked over the 3D printed enclosures thread for some inspiration and I ended up deciding that I wanted a sleek design that overlaps in each of the segments. I went through a few revisions and this is the design that I liked.

This sleek design overlaps each segment of the enclosure by 0.5", creating less opportunities for dust and small amounts of liquid to get through. I may even consider lining each of the segment junctions with tape to make it splash resistant.

Little bit of a hint at the front of the enclosure there, there are wire exits in the front and rear enclosures, allowing for the dual hub motors at the front and back to be powered in a very tidy way.

One of the things I wanted to consider when designing these enclosures was their ability to resist the downfalls of 3D printing. I made sure that all load-bearing paths are well filleted and that there was plenty of space for each of the screw holes to have a washer under the nut. Some of these downfalls were things that I didn’t take into account on the FrankenWheel build. I lost an enclosure segment or two to vibration and hasty design. My goal with this build is to be proud of it, and with this new enclosure, I will be able to say that it is a well-polished product.

Expand this section to read about and see some of the printed parts

3D Printing & Finishing

As of right now, there are 9 of the 11 enclosure segments printed, and only one of them came out with a printing error. I am using black ESUN PLA+, and I think this will be sufficient for the loads it will hold on this board. The enclosure pieces look fantastic and with the care that I paid to the modeling, they printed really great with no warp and perfectly clean edges. All of the prints are from my CTC Bizer dual. This printer is a clone of a clone - its a clone of the FlashForge Creator Pro, which is a Makerbot Replicator ripoff. I wouldn’t recommend anyone buying it now, but its been running strong since 2016 with only a thermistor replacement and upgrade to PEI print surface.

As the rest of the enclosures get printed out I will update pictures here. However, I just ran out of filament so I will be a bit delayed on the final parts.

5/20/20 - Some updates!

Here’s some pictures of the enclosure fully printed. I actually ended up coming up a bit short on the enclosure and had to extend the piece with the power switch in it. Additionally, the very front piece had a pretty bad print and some major sagging on the corners. I will end up re-printing it, but my printer decided to break and stop working so I will have to deal with the crappy one for now.


There’s still some finishing to be done, most of the overlapping bits have brims that I need to sand down and clean up, and I am considering other options that might make it look a bit better.

Expand this section to see how all the electronics are installed

Electronics

This board uses two sets of Landwheel hub motors. One set I got from my review unit L3-x that I got several years ago and has long since been disassembled. Most of the electronics construction can be seen in the FrankenWheel thread, but there are a few small changes to be made for the 4WD upgrade.

When I built the pack, I didn’t really have 4WD in mind, but with the 6p of lithium polymer power, I am confident that I will have more than enough bang for the task. After I heard from @Penny_Pincher that he had some extra hubs, the idea was spurred and I started thinking about it seriously. Recently, @revel_flo hooked me up with some sleeves and the proper screws to get the hubs working again, and those are sitting in the garage right now waiting to be installed.

I will be using a MakerX dual esc for the front two motors because of its small form factor and the limits that the hubs should be run at. I’ll be running 35A motor and 30A battery limits on the hub motors and I think the MakerX should handle that on 8s with no problem. The rear ones have been running for quite some time now on TB 4.12’s from 2017.

Close to final wiring is kind of rat-nest-y but I assure yall that it is all separated and insulated well enough for me to not have a fire on my hands. I intend on checking back in on it after a month or so of riding to make sure all the connections are safe. With the amount of foam stuffed into the enclosure I think I should have minimal vibrations, but it is a hub board so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them make it into the wiring.

Expand this section to see all of the final images!

Final Product

This section will hold all of the finalized images of the 4WD board.

This thread is still in progress and I will happily take any feedback my friends here might have!

I already know that I am going to have a bad time with the bushings on the Landwheel trucks because they have been pretty awful on turning ever since the beginning; they feel like standing on a sponge and turning, with about the same amount of response as well. You could lean far enough to fall off and the board still wouldn’t turn, even with the trucks pretty loose. I refuse to believe that the turning can be only attributed to having 92mm wheels on narrow trucks, so I may have to hit up @RipTideSports for some suggestions on how to improve my ride once it’s all assembled.

Anyway, thanks for reading! I’ll be keeping this up to date as I progress.

– Ryan

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Love a quality writeup! Might need too give photogrammetry another go after reading this in order to get the concave of my killshot right. Awesome stuff!

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Thanks Zach! I can’t wait to see what my final product will look like, there’s still a ways to go. The photogrammetry was an interesting experience for sure. The biggest source of the errors for me was probably the shiny surface of the bottom of my deck. The surface finish of the mesh was pretty bad and the outline could be better for sure, but it did its job well enough.

I placed some of my enclosure pieces onto the deck to see how the looked and the curvature fits perfectly, so it worked in that sense!

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super looking forward to this one, I got the mini-Bustin Cigar version at 31" - cutest thing eva.

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Aw haha thats cool. I hope it rides okay, when I was pushing it around it felt a little weird because of how high it is and the shape. It’s obviously very different with it being electric though and the flexibility will make the hubs feel better than if they were on a hard deck

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How did you do the drop downs? My build is a work in progress and it is leading to a lot of posts that make progress seem slow and harder to get feedback posts on.

Interested to see how this ends up. Even the riser design makes for such a clean layout.

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They’re in the little gear section at the end :stuck_out_tongue:
image

I’m excited to see my final product too. The only visible wire will be the wires exiting to the motors in the front and back, and those will have green & black cable sleeves as well so you can’t see the phase wire colors

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Thank you!

knowledge is power

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Went for a ride today, it was meant to be longer but got cut short by a weird issue. I don’t actually know what this error usually means but I have never gotten it before. I rode to my destination just fine but it did feel a little bit weird on the way there, had to lean my feet to one side most of the way.

I got off a few times and checked that both motors were still spinning, which they were. I thought it might be a motor issue since I had some weird torquesteer going on. Fast forward a few hours and I’m ready to leave my destination, and I got on my board and right from the start, one of the motors was doing quite bad, and then after that it stopped working all together, it just twitches now when I hit the throttle on it.

Any ideas what could be going on? Here’s a screenshot of my esc tracker, the voltages are wrong bc the bluetooth module stayed on as the voltage dropped once turning it off.

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I posted some updates to the main sections above.

Several days ago, I got my @YUTW123 MakerX esc and powered it up, did a motor detection on the second hub set with a few 3s cells I had laying around. Everything went smoothly and the small size of it is one of the only reasons 4wd is possible on this deck.

Once I get to the final wiring pictures, you guys will see how incredibly tight it is inside the enclosure.

Got my enclosure all printed out, went pretty smoothly except for the front piece, which was a sub-par print due to not having cooling fan.

After sticking all of the electronics in for the first time, I realized just how little space I had in the enclosure. With the placement of my power switch, I wasn’t going to be able to fit the long battery between the front esc / battery indicator, and the power switch.

I made some slight modifications to the power button segment (extended 1 inch and moved the switch a little bit) and re-printed it.

The print came out great and will give me JUST enough space to make it fit comfortably. I didn’t take any updated pictures here, only put it on my snapchat story, so here’s that.

After test fitting the electronics, I knew there were some things that I had to re-solder and prepare to be able to accept the additional ESC. Since I already had a y-splitter for my two TB vescs before, what I did was take the XT90 connector coming out of it and solder both of the TB vescs onto it. The space is so cramped in the back enclosure that there wasn’t enough space for two XT-90’s and I hate soldering them.

So out of the antispark switch, I’ve got an XT-90 with the two TB vescs, and then I’ve also got an XT-60. This one I had to extend by a foot and a half so it could reach the MakerX. After extending these, the power was sorted, so I jammed it all nicely together at the back and taped it into place to make it easier to shove the TB vescs in later.

The only other wiring I had left to do was finished today - extending the pwm cable from my receiver to the front of the enclosure. Fortunately I had an extra-long extension so it was just a matter of splicing it into the current harness. Pretty funny to see four connections coming out of the VX1 receiver lol

Next step is actually getting the electronics and enclosures onto the deck. I decided to put all of the padding on first before trying to final-fit everything. I bought a 10’ roll of neoprene sealing foam and have been using it generously around the pack. There’s pretty much nothing I hate more in esk8 than random vibrating noises, so I plan to make sure nothing in this enclosure can move (besides being able to flex).

I added this padding to all of the enclosure pieces and put two huge strips down the edges of the actual battery, to make sure it stays in place inside the enclosure. I tried moving the battery with the neoprene on, and the friction between the smooth deck and the neoprene is so great that I think you could stand the deck up vertically and it wouldn’t move.

These fit really nicely on the deck now, and even with the foam under the battery I still have some breathing room above the battery for extra flex capabilities. I’ll be checking how much the battery sags once I can turn it over with screws on it, but I think the foam should be able to easily hold it in place vertically within the enclosure.

Here’s a shot of all the internal electronics. I know it’s kind of messy but everything should be well insulated. This whole thing is pretty complicated as it is and doesn’t lend itself well to being organized. My next build will be much cleaner than this, for sure. There’s something to be said for how much easier it is to make something clean from the beginning, rather than adding to the same build and changing it three times.

After finishing the PWM wiring to the front esc, I made sure everything was properly detected, and had my first deck-run at 4wd. Sounds pretty crazy and I can’t wait to try it out. Tomorrow I plan to try and finish the packing in of all the electronics, secure everything, and mount the enclosures to the deck. It’s going to be super annoying trying to figure out where all the holes go, but hopefully I get them all straight.

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Super quick update, my first major test ride had some issues, but simple ones. One of the bullet connectors on a rear esc came undone twice, so I ended up bending it a bit and taping it to hopefully avoid that issue.

After fixing that I was able to ride for a bit and then after fully charging the board (of course) I set it down and a motor wasn’t working. I was like, really? I opened it back up again and when I was poking around, I heard sparking noises, and so I looked closely, and one of the connections on one of the TB Vescs was coming loose. The power cable that goes into the capacitor board on the positive side had come off its solder pad a bit. I did my best to fix it by re-melting the solder and adding a bit more, but we shall see how it holds up with time.

Here’s a dusty picture of it, I will take some better pictures soon. Happy that this is basically done now!

Sidenote, I switched out some of the bushings on it, and it still kind of turns like garbage. I am going to have to get the right bushings in this thing before I actually consider it awesome. The pivot cups are absolutely terrible and one of them actually broke in half, so that explains the lack of agility.

I would say that this probably attributes to bad turning performance. The back isn’t quite as bad, but it’s not great either.

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Awesome dood!
Nice thread and a pretty cool result.
I am curious what you think about riding 4wd hubs after replacing the bushings of course :grimacing:

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Thanks! It took way more time than I even know haha.

The power of 4wd hubs is pretty crazy, even on the crappy bushings. I still haven’t even maxed out the throttle yet, and this is just 8s. They’re pretty torquey.

If I’m not moving forward then I have to push to start, they can’t do it otherwise. I might try out HFI if I get around to it.

The reality is that they are still hubs and that I still feel bumps pretty hard, the deck flexes nicely though so that helps with constant vibrations, but shock loads kinda hurt sometimes. They can’t compare to the TB110’s lol even though the hubs are 92mm. The urethane on them isn’t that incredible either although it is thicker than some other hubs.

I’m happy with the result, just need bushings to make it actually fun to ride.

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hahaha whom you gonna tell this hahahaha
…I started esk8ing on hubs and for me it feels natural by now even it is NOT hehehehe…but it can be very tricky at speeds with bumbs and cracks. Just kicks away your board from under your feet.

second that. In 4wd configuration them “cheap” hubs are more than enough power and up to 30-35amps still pretty reliable from what i can speak. Its always just heat to keep in mind and check by hand from time to time, but you know about that, i am sure.

Yeah especially sidewalk cracks lmao they’re the worst. We have some huge ones around here too. I don’t think I’ve gone much over like 22 on this board quite yet because I don’t trust the bushings / pivot cups

This is about what Vesc Tool allocated to mine and they’ve been fine at that.

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sorry, but I havnt read the whole thread yet ( im not sure how im gonna missed that) and i have a question: You use dual makerx esc two times,one for the front and one for the rear. So, did you use 2 receivers as well?

Nah I have a makerx dual in the front because it’s so nice and small, and then the back has two TB 4.12’s that I’ve had for a long time in it. This was a 2wd before I converted it this year.

I run double split ppm, so split at the back, and then a pwm cable up to the front, into the UART port on the makerx. The makerx is running on CAN because it was super easy to just do that. (internal wiring)

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Ahh, yeah i got it. The Frankenwheel update :grinning:
Would it be possible to run a 4wd with 2 receivers without any hook up connection of lets say two dual esc? Must be, or am i wrong?

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Yeah you could, I’m using the GT2B and I’m pretty sure @b264 has done this before. But alas, I do not have two so, here we are lmao

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hahahaha, no you dont, but maybe some update ideas for the 2021 :grinning:
…yeah, i know about Brians dual receiver fetish and i would second that.
I ride two receivers as well :upside_down_face: but on a brands board and not on a diy.
Interesting is that you can mix up them esc like you want to.
Never heard about that before.

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