That would be excellent! I’ve never pulled the trigger on ordering a pcb, but I’d be comfortable soldering components and whatnot with a guide.
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Yes! I want to make this too but I noticed it was out of stock too! I’d love a guide!
I was looking for mosfets with 12v Vgs,th because I will use 12v to turn on the mosfet but I cant find any. It seems that the Vgs,th is the very minimum for the mosfet to turn on and higher will make it even more on? I was going to get the FQP50N06 60V N channel mosfet. Is this okay because it says the Vgs,th is 2-4V so I don’t want to overwhelm it. I will use max 60v2A I guess because the stepdown converter after it will use 12V10A.
Shall I get a heatsink for the mosfet?
Correct.
You want the threshold voltage to be a lot lower than the gate voltage you will use. Just make sure that you do not go over the max gate voltage rating.
You can see that the Vgs-th is only at a very low current level by noting the 250uA drain (I-subD) current that the 2V-4V Vgs-th gives you.
There should be a graph in the datasheet showing you the current the MOSFET will pass at different gate voltages.
As long as you are well above the gate threshold voltage (so the MOSFET turns on fully and you get the least amount of heating) and below the max gate voltage rating you should be okay. If you are trying to switch a lot of current then you might need to dive into the graphs to make sure you can do that.
If you are above about half a watt of power being dissipated by the MOSFET you will need a way to get rid of the heat. Even at 0.25W it can get toasty.
Take the max Rds-on spec and double it. This resistance goes up as the MOSFET heats up. Then multiply the resistance when hot by the square of the current the MOSFET will switch. This will be the power the MOSFET has to dissipate.
For example. Let’s assume an Rds-on max of 10mOhm switching 2A. That would be 10mOhm * 2 = 20mOhm hot resistance.
The power loss would be 20mOhm * (2A * 2A) = 80mW. No heat sink needed.
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will you be able to make a guide for us?
I want to make both these brake lights Arduino Based Brake light controller for UART based remote controls and this led strip Let there be ESK8 lights - #905 by Movation. Can I combine these and just use one Arduino to control both of these and have that Arduino powered by the uart port on my ubox spintend esc?
It seems like an accelerometer can be connected to an arduino and led strip like this: Make an LED Light Strip AHRS with Arduino and MPU-6050 - Projects and it looks like it doesnt use the port on the arduino that the brake light uses. Will the arduino be able handle controlling both of these? Like maybe i need the bigger sized arduino instead of pro-micro?
Ok, so a few things to unpack here
That first link never actually seemed to test the final product. It’s the Servisas guys, so could be great. But likely it will require software fine tuning, as all projects do. Also the buck converter he chose is only rated for 1A, so if you recreate it anyway, I hope you’re not planning on more than one board length strip of LEDs. You’ll want to check your current calcs.
The second link uses a custom pcb with an ESP32 (not quite Arduino, but close). Have you ever ordered a fully assembled custom pcb before? Additionally, if you dig deeper, most of the components on the BOM come up as question marks by that particular shop, so you’ll have to substitute or find similar parts. Again, hope you have some EE experience. The project hasnt been updated in some time, but you may be able to reuse the code.
Next - yes, you can use an Arduino to control individually addressable (“digital”) LED lighting. It’s a good, common solution. However, you probably don’t want to power your LED strips from the ubox spintend. If i remember correctly, its 12V port is rated at something like 3A. That could be enough, depends on how wild you want to go. If not you’ll need a dedicated buck converter rated for your battery’s voltage and higher current.
To get info from the uart, no matter the way you go about it, you’ll need to tap the RX pin of your VESC (like the first link).
With space inside an Esk8 enclosure at a premium, rather than buying an accelerometer breakout board and wiring it to the Arduino, just buy an Arduino with an IMU already on it. There should be a couple out there - one at least is the Nano 33 IoT.
With individually addressable LEDs, you can… individually… address… each pixel. So, yes, you can make half do fun glowy patterns and the other half react to uart inputs. It will take some work on the coding side of course. Any Arduino can easily control digital LED strips, if that’s all is doing.
If you’re not comfortable programming an Arduino you’re going to have a hard time making all of this happen. And definitely if you’ve never designed pcb schematics, don’t go ordering that custom pcb and expect it to work.
I’m happy to be wrong, but if you’re just starting out I would recommend start with a digital LED strip like Adafruit’s Neopixel or Dotstar, a run of the mill Arduino Nano / Micro, and get that glowing before going deeper.
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I wont be able to make my own pcb, im considering that as an alternative only if b264 or someone else were to make a guide. My uart is full with the davega so the unclejohn recommended putting the ubox in ppm+uart mode and then I can get the signal for my break light and led strip from the servo line on the ppm port and this would reduce the burden of the esc’s transmission of throttle signals. Id go ahead and just use the other project but that uses uart so I need to figure out how to read from the ppm port instead and ill use the rest of that code.
I was initially going to get a 4-6 channel with remote but if I can just connect a reciever/transmitter to the Arduino uno then that would be nice. I have 6 different lights I want to control. (+1 horn connected to ubox). I will use the 12v light port of the esc output controlled by to turn off the dc-dc converter with a mosfet so it doesnt waste with quiescent current. This will turn of all lights and arduino. Alternatively, I can have it just turn off all lights but then power the arduino with 5v from ppm if I want the arduino to remain on whenever the vesc in on. The arduino transmitter receiver has 4 buttons so I will control 4 of the 6 lights with this extra remote. For the other 2 lights, could I use the throttle like a button to turn on/off the lights? Like if I pull on the breaks all the way 4x in a row it will turn on those 2 lights?
All the lights will be powered by the battery through the dc-dc converter (12v10a but can get 12v20a if needed) but they will be controlled by the arduino using mosfets. I have no idea where all this will connect on the arduino so will it have enough ports for me to also add the rf-reciever module?
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No vesc ever will produce a ppm signal for you. It only listens to a signal coming from a ppm receiver, meaning you’re stuck to ppm-only remotes
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Here’s is the message from spintend. 
Again, a remote must produce that ppm signal in the first place. I really don’t know how his remote works but i doubt he can make the lights/horn thing with just ppm signal.
Your best bet might be to learn to listen to the canbus connection as that contains everything needed to drive any number of vescs with just 2 wires
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Alternatively, get more UARTs:
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Shipping is as much as it costs! That’ll end up costing me $100cad. Is coding with ppm possible? Also it doesn’t say it supports ubox and fw 5.1, he doesn’t have that to be able to fix a bug if one arises.
That is an unfortunate reality for international shipments I am not able to get around at the moment and one the stands in the way of many people from ordering.
Just to add some clarity here, FW 5.1 is supported by the uSplit. The uSplit supports the general VESC UART communication scheme which does not vary between VESC based ESCs. It could vary between FW versions but that is unlikely at this point in the project’s life. You are correct that I do not have a ubox ESC to test with if something specific to that goes wrong, but it is also unlikely that there would be an issue specific to that particular ESC.
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Thoughts on this? Nlpearl 4'' Light Bar/Work Light 72W 126W Led Work Lights for Off road Tractors SUV Trucks Spot LED Light Bar Fog Lamp 12V 24V|Light Bar/Work Light| - AliExpress
I want to run 2 of these 72w (36v 2a?) ones in series (72v 2a?) for my 16s battery (67.2v).
Depending on where you read those lights have a 30V, 32V, or 36V limit…be careful.
Depending on the circuitry inside you might not be able to run them in series successfully.
Bottom line…not worth the risk IMHO.
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Yeah I was confused. Would it be worth it if I message the seller to double check? They usually respond
If you are going to buy those then I would think it would be a very good thing to find out if they will burn out if you use them. 
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They said it can’t be used at 36v. Their 126w 4 inch leds are only 20-18w. How disappointing. I think I will go with auxbeam straight from their website. I will also get 2 additional mounts so hopefully with 3 it will be okay on a skateboard. The 3 will be connected to a 3d printed mount I will make to attach to the truck.
I’m not worried about 9 inch wide because that’s the same as the warren deck and I’ll use mbs ii trucks.
These look almost too bright! Probably be less if I hook up to 12v instead of 24v (guessing the video was 24v).
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alright who can ID a smallish footprint HV buck for me? all those small ones on AZ can’t handle 75V from what I can tell
thanks in advance to anyone that helps